MariaDB Corporation is the former SkySQL, which was set up by a former MySQL senior vice-president of global services, Ulf Sandberg, with another MySQL co-founder, David Axmark as an adviser.

Widenius named his project after his daughter when he forked the MysQL codebase at a time when Oracle was hesitating over what it should do with this product which it had acquired as part of its purchase of Sun Microsystems.

A few days back, SkySQL announced it would be changing its name to MariaDB Corporation. This is good timing, given the inroads that MariaDB has made into FOSS set-ups. It enables MariaDB to increase its footprint in the corporate world at the expense of MySQL.

The SUSE-MariaDB agreement was unveiled at IBM Enterprise 2014; the company says many others will follow in the run-up to the release of version 12 of its enterprise server operating system.

SUSE said MariaDB Enterprise would be optimised for SLES 12 on IBM POWER8-based servers. "SUSE and MariaDB will be publishing tuning and optimisation guides for customers and partners to further demonstrate the capabilities and performance benefits of Linux on Power (systems)," the company said.

A media release quoted Nils Brauckmann, president and general manager of SUSE, as saying: "This collective work with MariaDB speaks to the opportunity that open source brings to IBM Power Systems. Working with MariaDB in our strong ecosystem of partners offers our customers new and innovative ways to make the most from their existing IT investments, while accessing the latest and most powerful computing applications and technologies."

Patrik Sallner, chief executive of MariaDB Corporation, said: "This partnership is a win for SUSE, a win for IBM and a win for MariaDB's customers and community. The optimisation of MariaDB for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12 on IBM Power Systems servers with POWER8 processors gives enterprise companies an ideal way to easily deploy database environments with unparalleled scale-out performance and near continuous availability."