Monty Program Ab, a MySQL database engineering company, and Percona, a MySQL services and support firm, have announced the 'The Open Database Alliance', a vendor-neutral consortium designed to become the industry hub for the MySQL open source database, including MySQL and derivative code, binaries, training, support, and other enhancements for the MySQL community and partner ecosystem. The Open Database Alliance will comprise a collection of companies working together to provide the software, support and services for MariaDB, an enterprise-grade, community-developed branch of MySQL.

The intent of the Open Database Alliance is to unify all MySQL-related development and services, providing a solution to the fragmentation and uncertainty facing the communities, businesses and technical experts involved with MySQL. Still under development, the Open Database Alliance is open to all businesses, organisations and individuals interested in helping create a new, centralised resource for MySQL and to ensure that it remains a top quality, high performance open source database.

Monty Program Ab, founded by Monty Widenius, the 'father' of the MySQL database, and Percona, established by MySQL expert Peter Zaitsev, are the founding members of the Open Database Alliance. Monty Program is currently the primary developer of MariaDB, a branch ofthe MySQL database that includes all major open source storage engines, including the Maria transactional storage engine. "Our goal with the Open Database Alliance is to provide a central clearinghouse for MySQL development, to encourage a true open development environment with community participation, and to ensure that MySQL code remains extremely high quality;' noted Monty. "Participating members at this stage in the Alliance' will have a strong voice in how the organisation is structured, and we look forward to collaborating with anyone in the industry that provides or depends on MySQL:'