MariaDB’s acquisition of Codership: Why enterprises should care

Struggling database company MariaDB PLC is making further efforts to get back on its feet, good news for enterprises running MariaDB or looking to adopt it. At least, that’s what analysts think after hearing of MariaDB’s announcement that it is acquiring Finnish data replication software provider Codership.

“The acquisition stresses MariaDB’s evolution into a complete, recurring-revenue open-source database platform, complementing its recent investments in vector search, analytics and cloud-native tooling since being taken private by K1 last September,” said Devin Pratt, research director at IDC.

A rocky road

MariaDB PLC, the firm that provides database services and SaaS offerings built on the core open-source database that is managed by the MariaDB Foundation, had been on a rocky ride since 2023, before its shareholders accepted an offer by California-based investment firm K1 Investment Management.

The seeds of the company’s troubles were sown when it decided to go public in December 2022. After that, the company saw its market capitalization plummet from an initial $445 million to just over $10 million by the end of 2023.

While the first quarter of 2023 saw the company lay off staffers, the second quarter saw it file cautionary statements about its financial health in a prospectus, only to be warned later by the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) that it was not meeting listing norms.

October of 2023 brought more woes for the database-as-a-service provider, with the company being forced to lay off 28% of its workforce and shut down two of its products, MariaDB Xpand and MariaDB SkySQL. Three months later, Microsoft announced that Azure Database for MariaDB was scheduled for retirement by September 19, 2025.

However, since the acquisition, K1 Investment Management, MariaDB PLC’s new owner, has been trying to steer the company towards profitability by hiring Rohit de Souza as the new CEO.

Just before de Souza’s appointment, MariaDB had started losing customers such as ServiceNow, which analysts thought was the result of lack of innovation and its being unable to keep up with enterprise requirements or demands.

Since his appointment, the new CEO has been trying to make the database company more attractive to enterprises by introducing new features, and the acquisition of Codership is an step in that direction.

How does the acquisition help?

MariaDB’s acquisition of Codership will mainly aid in data replication, a MariaDB PLC spokesperson said, adding that the focus of the deal was Codership’s Galera Cluster, a synchronous multi-master replication suite for MySQL and MariaDB databases.

What that means is that, using Galera Cluster, MariaDB is able to provide high availability and data integrity by replicating data across all nodes in a cluster, ensuring that transactions are applied consistently on every server.

However, before the acquisition Codership was already a MariaDB partner, and the database provider has offered its subscribers the option to choose Galera Cluster for the last nine years. One third of its customers already purchase Galera Cluster as part of their MariaDB subscription, according to the company.

But the database software provider feels that the acquisition will help it to improve and integrate the Galera clustering suite much faster for its users and customers.

While Pratt agrees that it could help MariaDB reduce delays in integrating Galera Clustering for enterprises, he pointed out that the acquisition is more strategic: to prevent future forks of Codership software by owning the code.

The analyst also believes that existing and prospective customers will benefit from having a single vendor for both the database engine and high-availability clustering, resulting in faster rollout of high-availability enhancements, unified support, and service levels for zero-data-loss deployments under one SLA.

In addition, the MariaDB spokesperson said that the acquisition will not change anything for Codership customers and Galera Cluster users at the moment, noting, “they can expect the same level of support that they have received in the past.”

However, Pratt pointed out that Codership and existing Galera Cluster customers might be pushed to adopt incentivized upgrade paths to MariaDB’s Enterprise Platform, while the community versions of MariaDB and MySQL remain free.

The company has not disclosed the details of the transaction.