MariaDB will officially announce Roger Bodamer and Cate Lochead as its new executives on 12 July. Both have deep Oracle, MongoDB and Couchbase experience.

Bodamer will fill the role of chief product officer and head the product, engineering and strategy teams to deliver new capabilities which expand MariaDB support for emerging use cases.

Lochead will serve as chief marketing officer and is charged with building a global brand to grow and accelerate sales.

The announcement continues MariaDB's momentum in 2016. In January the organisation announced US$9m in series B funding, the appointment of chief executive officer Michael Howard, and the official hiring of Monty Widenius who is the founder of both MySQL and MariaDB. MySQL was acquired by Sun Microsystems which in turn was acquired by Oracle. MariaDB is a fork of MySQL and continues Monty's vision for his DBMS. MariaDB now boasts a community of 12 million users.

In April, MariaDB announced another US$3m as an extension to the series B funding and also launched a move into the big data analytics space.

Analyst firn 451 Research forecasts the total data market will reach US$123.3b over the next five years, with growth driven by enterprise investment in data management systems which can reliably power high-performance real-time SaaS, cloud and on-premises application.

MariaDB sees Bodamer and Lochead as strategic appointments who will position MariaDB to take a strong share of this market. Bodamer contributed to the first distributed and interoperability features of the Oracle database kernel. He subsequently worked for Apple and MongoDB and personally holds several patents for database and middleware technology.

Lochead has two decades' experience defining new categories and building successful marketing programs for emerging technology providers. She most recently led Couchbase's marketing team which contributed to doubling year-over-year growth and establishing the company as a leader in the NoSQL space. Lochead has additionally led marketing teams at Oracle, Intuit and Virsa as well as run her own consulting firm aiding early-stage star-tups with marketing programmes.

“We are investing to make MariaDB the leading open source database provider for the new use cases and deployment models that are powering today’s applications. Cate and Roger bring the kind of experience we need to build a business capable of earning a significant portion of the multibillion-dollar database opportunity," said Michael Howard, chief executive of MariaDB.