2025 for MonetDB Foundation is a year of taking the next steps to become a more mature organisation.
In the Netherlands, an ANBI is a “Public Benefit Organisation” (Dutch: Algemeen Nut Beogende Instelling). The Dutch Tax Administration poses strict conditions on nonprofit organisations with an ANBI-status. For instance, at least 90% of the efforts of an ANBI has to be focused on the general good; the policymakers of an ANBI may only receive highly limited compensation for their work; and the ANBI must be transparent about its incomes and spendings, which must be reported annually.
The board has decided to apply for an ANBI status for MonetDB Foundation. Therefore, we have provided a detailed description of the foundation, including updated mission and vision statements, what we do and how are funds acquired and spent, and compensation policies. Every year, plans for the future will be posted in the roadmaps, while summaries of the past will be reported in the annual reports. In this way, we would like to show the professionalisme of the foundation and earn trust of our (potential) donors.
Currently, trying to increase MonetDB’s visibility is our way of indirect fundraising. In 2025, we have done much work in this area.
Roadmap We have improved the way how the roadmap for future development of MonetDB is presented. In principle, we will publish roadmap every December for the next year. A roadmap is split into three parts:
When planning the roadmap, we pay special attention to making MonetDB more easier to use for new users, for instance, by adding more connectors to directly query external data sources.
Github Discussions Since Github is one of the most popular platform on which (open-source) developers are active, we will make more use of Github features to interact with (potential) MonetDB users. Next to Github Issues, we have also opened Github Discussions for various discussions about MonetDB, but in particular, we would like to collect users’ preferences for new features.
Documentation The MonetDB Documentation is being updated, expanded and reorganised. The result of this work should make it much easier for users to find the necessary information. We are also adding many missing documentations for MonetDB features, so that MonetDB can be found more easily when users search for particular database features.
Social Media We have been more active on social media, such as writing new blogs and sharing information on LinkedIn. In addition, we have started to contact organisations such as EuroStack to have MonetDB listed as an independent, open-source European product.
2025 was a fruitful year for the continued development of the MonetDB software suite.
In March, a major MonetDB version, Mar2025, was released. This version mainly contains new SQL features and relatively small stability and performance improvements. We have consciously kept the changes in this release limited, so that we have a stable version to base on before introducing major changes.
In December, a second MonetDB major version, Dec2025, was released. This version contains all the major changes in the kernel of the MonetDB server we have planned for 2025. In particular, the new memory allocator framework was released, which is now in charge of memory management in all layers of a MonetDB server.
Further more, the core team has made much progress in the development of the multi-year projects “parallel pipeline”, “nested data type” and “embedding vector search”.
Similar to 2024, we have received a small donation (i.e. <€100) from a private person without specific wishes, and again, we spent this donation on running the MonetDB testing system. We have also received a small donation from MonetDB Solutions to cover the operational costs.
All other work such as described above was done by volunteering contributors.
In 2026, we plan to spend more effort on increasing MonetDB’s visibility, e.g:
Further, we want to explore some tentative ideas, for instance, possibilities to add MonetDB as a basic packet in the installation of a Linux operating system or a Cloud vendor; ask users’ affiliation information before they can use the software; and ask users more proactively for donation when they have used MonetDB for a while.
For the development of MonetDB, we have an ambitious roadmap. After several years of work, we can now finally make concrete release plan for the new parallel pipelined query execution engine, which will make MonetDB even faster and more flexible in process data at a large scale. Together with the “native support for nested data types” and “embedding vector search”, MonetDB will be better equipped to support the emerging AI applications.