Support for the MySQL build ends in September as the company develops separate premium replication technology
With support for MySQL Galera Cluster ending in two months, open source observers are again questioning how much of the technology's future MariaDB plc intends to keep in the community edition.The company says Galera remains a core, open source component of MariaDB while it develops separate replication capabilities for enterprise customers. In March, MariaDB, the company behind the database forked from MySQL, reversed course and announced that MariaDB Community Server 12.3 would continue to include the Galera Cluster libraries.
Galera is GPLv2-licensed database clustering technology created by Codership Oy, which MariaDB plc acquired in May 2025. Developers had previously noticed the clustering libraries were being removed from future versions of MariaDB Community Server, the open source database stewarded by the MariaDB Foundation.
Frédéric Descamps, open source evangelist at the MariaDB Foundation, said at the time that there had been a "friendly reset" in the company's relationship with the open source community. He added that the concerns about the future of Galera in MariaDB were a "predictable outcome of people caring about continuity."Those concerns have resurfaced as the September 30 end-of-life date approaches for MySQL Galera Cluster.Announcing the decision in December, Max Mether, co-founder and vice president of server product management at MariaDB plc, urged users to migrate, saying: "This extended timeline gives your team ample opportunity to leverage the new in-place migration method and secure your future with MariaDB Galera Cluster." He also said the company was focusing innovation and new feature development exclusively on MariaDB Galera Cluster. "This consolidation allows the combined engineering team to deliver more powerful and advanced clustering features, ensuring industry-leading high availability for MariaDB," he said. Others have questioned whether migrating from MySQL to MariaDB is a price worth paying to remain with Galera. In a social media post, Marco Tusa, MySQL Technical leader at open source consultancy Percona, said: "Migrating to MariaDB isn't a simple 'drop-in' binary swap. Years of divergence in data dictionaries, [transaction] formats, and system tables mean moving to MariaDB is essentially adopting a completely different database." Percona provides its own alternative clustering technology for MySQL, XtraDB Cluster (PXC), which it says is open source with no proprietary hurdles. The consultancy also maintains its own tracking fork of Galera with critical stability fixes.
