Navigating Open Source at Scale: Why Swiss Organisations Need a Sovereign Database Strategy
MariaDB is everywhere. It ships in countless Linux distributions, powers cloud-native platforms, and runs quietly behind many of the applications organisations rely on every day. That ubiquity is exactly why MariaDB deserves more attention, not less. When community builds move from “good enough” to business-critical, and AI workloads put new demands on the data layer, the risks add up: unsupported versions, unpatched vulnerabilities, licensing ambiguity, and operational friction.
That’s exactly what we tackled in a joint webinar with MariaDB on October 1st. VSHN co-founder Aarno Aukia spoke with Jonas Schwegler from MariaDB about what digital sovereignty looks like in practice: not as a buzzword, but as an architectural decision for your data layer.
Missed it? The recording is now online.
What the recording covers
- How a unified MariaDB Enterprise architecture with MaxScale zero-downtime failover delivers the reliability that compliance requirements demand
- Why Swiss-hosted OpenShift operations matter when you need a sovereign foundation for AI: RAG pipelines, native vector search, and agentic workloads, without public cloud lock-in
- How to consolidate transactional, analytical, and AI workloads in a single engine, eliminating the ETL complexity that comes with running separate systems side by side
- What it means to have your database estate operated natively within Switzerland, with direct access to MariaDB engineering when you need it
Why this matters now
Open source databases give organisations flexibility and control, but only when they’re managed deliberately. Too often, MariaDB community deployments grow organically until nobody knows exactly which version runs where, whether it’s patched, or what happens when it fails at 3 am. Sovereignty isn’t just about where your data lives. It’s about whether you can truly stand behind the reliability, security, and compliance of the systems that run it.
Meet Monty Widenius at the VSHN Tower
On Monday, October 19th, 2026, from 1:30 to 5:00 pm (CEST), we’re hosting a Technical Workshop together with MariaDB at the VSHN Tower in Zürich. Speakers include MariaDB founder Michael “Monty” Widenius, Jonas Schwegler and Anders Karlsson from MariaDB, and Aarno Aukia and Tobias Brunner from VSHN.
What to expect:
- A live demo of MaxScale and MariaDB Cloud, including BYOA/BYOC
- Community vs. Enterprise, side by side
- A real-world customer case study
- A Kahoot quiz with a prize
- A closing apéro with time for questions and networking
Seats are limited to 40 people.
Markus Speth
Marketing, Communications, People