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More frequent series releases will deliver innovations to the MariaDB community faster, the company says.

This week, MariaDB announced a new release model for MariaDB Community Server, often referred to as MariaDB Server. The new release centers on the goal of delivering new features and innovation faster to the millions of MariaDB users around the world, according to MariaDB.

Under the new model, new community server releases will occur once a quarter, rather than once a year. This will allow delivery of more opportunities for new features and contributions to the MariaDB user base, the company says.

“The cloud has created an expectation of continuous innovation and deployment,” said Max Mether, co-founder and vice president of server product management, MariaDB Corporation.

“In addition, other successful open source projects, such as Ubuntu and Fedora have adopted a similar frequent release model. By changing the release model, we’ll be able to meet today’s expectations for faster and more predictable innovation cycles for the MariaDB community.” 

Quarterly releases with one year maintenance

Starting with the next major update, the new MariaDB Community Server release series will be available on a quarterly basis. MariaDB will maintain each release series for one year. In collaboration with Linux distributions, some release series will have longer maintenance windows. These will happen at least every other year.

MariaDB Corporation will continue to issue releases for MariaDB Enterprise on a consistent basis. Maintenance will continue for at least five years for each release series.

“MariaDB has one of the largest and most engaged communities in open source,” said Kaj Arnö, CEO, MariaDB Foundation. “With an emphasis on more frequent new features, we believe this will drive even broader adoption of MariaDB Server around the globe. It also will increase engagement with the community as there will now be four yearly opportunities for contributors to see their code merged.”

“For over eight years, MariaDB has been a popular database choice in the Fedora Linux distribution,” said Michal Schorm, Fedora Project contributor and MariaDB package maintainer for Fedora Linux. “I look forward to continuing my collaboration with the team behind MariaDB to bring future releases under their new release model to the vast user base that rely on Fedora Linux every day.”