EIB provides EUR 25 million funding for MariaDB open-source database system

The European Investment Bank (EIB), the non-profit lending institution of the European Union, will provide EUR 25 million in funding to the eponymous Finnish company behind the MariaDB open-source database system. MariaDB will use the money to expand its customer base in Europe, America and Asia, and to hire more developers in Helsinki.

The funding round is part of the European Commission Investment Plan for Europe, which aims to revive the European economy after the 2008 crisis. As part of the plan, over the years 2015-2017 more than EUR 300 million has been made available through the EIB's European Fund for Strategic Investments (EFSI) for strategic projects around Europe.

Massive shakeup

According to the EIB, analysts generally agree that the database market currently is in the midst of a massive shakeup, in which large companies are replacing their proprietary, legacy database systems with modern, open-source alternatives. This disruption provides a huge opportunity to MariaDB, which is currently the fastest growing database management system.

MariaDB is a fork of the MySQL Relational Database Management System (RDBMS created by the MySQL lead developer after the latter was acquired by Oracle (via Sun Microsystems). Being a drop-in replacement for MySQL and available under the GPLv2 open-source licence, MariaDB now functions as the de facto general-purpose RDBMS for new applications.