Monty Program Ab was founded by Michael "Monty" Widenius, the founder and creator of MySQL®. Monty Program is a center of engineering excellence for MariaDB, the Aria storage engine, MySQL®, and other associated technologies. We are a founding member of the Open Database Alliance, a consortium of companies that provide best-of-breed support and services to mission critical database deployments.

Monty Program Ab currently has 21 employees. More than half of our staff are full-time developers, including most of the original MySQL engineers, some new personnel, and Monty. We have a better knowledge of the core MySQL® code than any other company! We are well funded and all of our plans and strategies take a long-term view.

Our main areas of focus are:

  • MariaDB, a branch of the MySQL® database server which includes all major open source storage engines, including the Aria storage engine. Our ambition is to make this the best open and free MySQL branch for the MySQL user and developer communities. MariaDB is available under the terms of the GPL v2 license, just like MySQL.
  • We do NRE (Non-recurring engineering) work on the MySQL server and help companies with some of the challenges with open source. See our Commercial offerings for more information.
  • The Aria engine, a transactional storage engine for MariaDB and MySQL®.
  • We work with developers in the MySQL community to create a better MySQL® database server by using agile and open development which encourages community participation. See Working with the community and Contributing.
  • Networking with other companies and communities and community members that are doing development on MySQL.
  • Providing a fun and safe workplace for engineers who know the MariaDB and MySQL® database servers.
  • Following and endorsing the hacking business model, which is the basis for our company rules.

If you want to be part of developing MariaDB or Aria, join the maria-developers team or visit us on IRC. See Contributing for more information.

We are also interested in working with and investing in disruptive technology start-up companies that do Open Source and community products. This is done through our investment company Open Ocean S.รก.r.l