MariaDB Foundation today announced that Microsoft has become a platinum sponsor. The sponsorship will help the Foundation in its goals to support continuity and open collaboration in the MariaDB ecosystem, and to drive adoption, serving an ever growing community of users and developers.

“Joining the MariaDB Foundation as a Platinum member is a natural next step in Microsoft’s open source journey. In addition to Microsoft Azure’s strong support for open source technologies, developers can use their favorite database as a fully managed service on Microsoft Azure that will soon include MariaDB.” said Rohan Kumar, General Manager for Database Systems at Microsoft.

Monty Widenius, founder of MySQL and MariaDB, stated “Microsoft is here to learn from and contribute to the MariaDB ecosystem. MariaDB Foundation welcomes and supports Microsoft towards this goal.”

One of the fundamental principles in Azure is all about choice. Customers of Azure will be able to run the apps they love, and Microsoft wants to make sure that the MySQL and MariaDB experience on Windows and Linux hosts in Azure is excellent.

“We have already already seen an influx of patches from Microsoft that improves MariaDB’s compatibility on Windows. This further helps drive MariaDB adoption on all possible platforms.” stated Otto Kekäläinen, CEO of the MariaDB Foundation.

Microsoft’s community engagement through open source foundations helps to nurture and advance the core technologies that the IT industry relies upon. MariaDB is a natural partner to Microsoft, as it is the fastest growing open source database. In most Linux distributions MySQL has already been completely replaced with MariaDB.

The MariaDB Foundation is a non-profit incorporated in Delaware, USA. The foundation provides a reliable global point of contact for collaboration. There are a wide range of companies using MariaDB for commercial purposes, with some listed on mariadb.org/about/supporters. The Foundation aims to foster collaboration to the benefit of everyone, using proven open-source software development methods.