In 2024, our foremost task was to continue setting up the administrative side of things for the new foundation. By the end of the year, all the basics are in place and we have started some fundraising activities. However, as usual, most of our time was spent on the core activities.
The first board meeting took place in January 2024, during which it was decided that the management of MonetDB Foundation will consist of a board of five members: Prof. dr. Arjen de Vries (chairman), Ying Zhang (secretary), Niels Nes (treasurer), Sjoerd Mullender (member) and Dick Broekhuis (member). The board members donate their time to conduct work needed to keep the foundation operational, and the foundation has no employees.
The board will meet twice per year and is responsible for i) determining and carrying out the policies of the foundation, ii) determining the roadmap of the development of MonetDB, and iii) managing the finance of the foundation. Decisions concerning these major topics will be made by votes of the majority of the board members.
The IPR of the MonetDB software suite and the domain www.monetdb.org have been transferred to the MonetDB Foundation. The monetdb.org website has been updated to reflect the establishment of the MonetDB Foundation and extended to allow donations.
First of all, the board has defined that the way of fundraising should be appropriate for a foundation of free and open-source software. It should reflect the characters of the organisation: independent, free spirit, open minded and professional. Therefore, we will refrain from overly commercial activities and aggressive ads champagnes, such as ads in the monetdb.org website or interrupting the use of MonetDB with request for donation.
Under this general principle, the foundation wants to raise funds to conduct its core activities around the MonetDB software suite, for instance, to hire developers for a particular feature or improvement; to purchase hardware or cloud services for the development and testing of the software; and to finance the maintenance of documentation, performance benchmarks and media outreach to the general public.
Currently, our primary means of fundraising is online knowledge sharing. Our main goal is to raise awareness of MonetDB as an extra option (next to the more well-known DBMSs, such as PostgreSQL and MariaDB) for applications that store and analyse data. For instance, we will write more blogs to explain MonetDB’s technologies and their usefulness in practice. On online platforms such as Github and StackOverflow, we actively answer users questions and help resolving their MonetDB problems.
Our future plan to increase public’s awareness of MonetDB include i) be more active on social media such as LinkedIn; ii) free lectures for students; and iii) presenting MonetDB in open-source conferences, such as FOSDEM.
The donation page is up and running. The board has chosen a stepwise engagement. Without specification, small donations of <€500.- are solely spent on supporting our core activities, while a fraction (<10%) of large donations can be used to cover the administrative costs. However, donors can determine how their donations are spent at any time.
In 2024, the foundation has received a small donation (i.e. <€100) from a private person without specific wishes. We gave it some thoughts and decided to spend it on running the MonetDB testing system (more about testing below), since it is crucial in guarding MonetDB’s quality. The foundation has also received donations from MonetDB Solutions to cover costs, such as the hardware and cloud services needed for the development and testing of MonetDB, the hosting of www.monetdb.org, and the bank and accountant costs of the foundation. So, currently, the foundation only has a tiny income, its spending is limited to the basic operational costs of the foundation.
The foundation has received a significant amount of in-kind donations from its contributors. Thanks to their development effort, MonetDB Foundation was able to produce one major release and six minor releases for the MonetDB software suite containing many new SQL features and performance, stability and security improvements. For more details, please see the release notes of the Dec2023 and Aug2024 versions of MonetDB.
Furthermore, the core MonetDB developers have made much progress in the multi-year development projects as described in the roadmap of 2024. In particular, we have extended our old, text-based and nightly-run testweb with
All results of these extensive testing tools are visible to everyone all the time. We thank the private donor for his/her support for this work. In addition, the public can also follow MonetDB’s current development activities in our Mercurial or GitHub repositories, and future development plans in our roadmaps. In short, every aspect of MonetDB development and maintenance is available for the public all the time.
Database technology is the core interest of the foundation and its code contributors. In 2025, we will continue working on various topics that are interesting challenges for the database developers and provide useful features to the MonetDB users, including connectors to load external data sources on-the-fly into SELECT queries; an allocator framework to manage memory allocation in a more efficient way; a new parallel pipelined execution query engine; and native support for nested (JSON) data and embedding vectors. For more information, please see the roadmap of 2025.
We are aware that our current ways of fundraising will only results in highly limited monetary results (in short time). One major difficulty is cause by that we stick strictly to the open-source etiquette and do not trace our users. At a consequent of this, mostly, we only learn indirectly who is using MonetDB and in what way on rare occasions. Another major difficulty is the high competition with the much more well-known database management systems (DBMSs), such as PostgreSQL and MariaDB. This situation makes it hard for MonetDB to get an opportunity to present itself at popular conferences such as FOSDEM, but we will keep trying.
In 2025, we plan to consider more means of attracting funds (but still in unobtrusive ways for the MonetDB users), as well as attracting more contributors outside the core team.