About MonetDB Foundation

The MonetDB Foundation is the independent not-for-profit organisation behind MonetDB, a free and open-source relational database management system (RDBMS) for large scale analytical workloads and with full transaction support. Established in December 2023, our foundation holds the intellectual property (IP) rights of the MonetDB software suite of programs and is dedicated to its further development and long-term maintenance.

Our mission

We aim to distribute, maintain, and advance a free, fast, and feature-rich database management system geared towards data analytics.

Our vision

We believe in building a better world by improving our understanding of the vast quantities of data at our disposal. Efficient software systems for data storage and analysis are a first step towards this vision. Everyone working with data should have free and open access to such tools with expert support.

What we do

To carry out our mission and expand on our vision, the MonetDB Foundation spends more than 90% of its donations on what we call the DISCo activities:

• Development

  Funding developers to build new features and improve performance in all aspects of the MonetDB software suite, from the server side to the client side and from the uppermost SQL language layer to the lowermost execution engine. With these developments, MonetDB will be able to not only better support existing applications, but also handle new types of applications (e.g. vector search) and exploit emerging hardware.

• Improvement

  Funding developers to run continuous integration tests and performance benchmarks, based on which the developers can conduct functional and performance bug fixes. In addition, we support the infrastructure costs of the on-premises and cloud servers that are needed for the maintenance and development of MonetDB.

• Support

  Expanding documentation and providing comprehensive support to our users via Q&As, trouble shooting and best practice advice.

• Community

  Engaging the community through discussions, news, etc, and reaching out to a larger audience through social media to expand the community.

Please check out our annual reports for details regarding activities we have conducted since the establishment of the MonetDB Foundation. Also have a look at our roadmap for activities planned in the near future.

Who we are

Our organisation comprises a small but tight-knit team of core developers behind the MonetDB software. The core team is primarily responsible for the development and maintenance of the MonetDB database server, as well as the majority of the connecting tools with third party software. In addition, there are a small number of external developers who contribute various (peripheral) features to the MonetDB software suite. A (fairly) complete list of our contributors can be found here.

The MonetDB Foundation has a board consisting of five members: Prof. Dr. Arjen de Vries (chairman), Ying Zhang (secretary), Niels Nes (treasurer), Sjoerd Mullender (member) and Dick Broekhuis (member).

Although our organisation was only established in 2023, the team of MonetDB researchers and developers and the MonetDB software suite go way back to the late ’70s. You can read here all about the major events in the long history of MonetDB.

General information