Two well known sea creatures in Maria's vision You might have heard the story of how we picked a sea-lion as our logo. Now that this lovely beast has been with us for a while, we think it’s high time to give it a name and of course we turn to our wonderful community for suggestions. The rules are simple: complete this form, telling us what you think we should name the sea lion and why. Later, Maria Widenius will pick her favorite from the submissions, and the winner will get a collection of MariaDB t-shirts and other swag, an artwork by Maria, and of course eternal fame!…

New MariaDB releases come with regular intervals. Releasing a new version is a balance between new functionality and bugfixes on one side, and stability on the other. How do we get optimum quality for the releases? And what exactly is quality, from the point of view of DBAs and developers that use MariaDB Server? That’s the setting of our MariaDB Server MiniFest in two weeks. New MariaDB Releases: The DBA & Developer Experience  This MiniFest is called “mini” for three key reasons: It has just one topicIt is much shorter, less than half a dayIt happens just in one time zone But it still builds on the pillars of success from our MariaDB Server Fest in Sep 2020: It features expert speakers on MariaDB ServerIt has pre-recording, subtitles, and follow-up discussionsIt is interactive, with the speakers “cloned” on Zulip chat The special sauce The special sauce for this MiniFest is Internal presenters explain the logic of release policiesExternal presenters give the candid user perspectiveThe desired outcome: improved processes and quality The conference format The internal (provider) presentations have a 10+10 minute format.…