Navigating Open Source at Scale: Why Swiss Organisations Need a Sovereign Database Strategy

MariaDB is everywhere. It ships inside countless Linux distributions, powers cloud-native platforms, and sits quietly underneath applications that organisations rely on every day. That ubiquity is exactly why it deserves more attention, not less. As Community builds move from “good enough” to business-critical, and as AI workloads pile new demands onto the data layer, the risks that come with unsupported versions, unpatched vulnerabilities, licensing ambiguity, and operational friction start to add up.

We’re tackling this head-on in a joint webinar with MariaDB.

When: Thursday, October 1, 11:00 AM – 12:00 PM (CEST)
Where: Online via Zoom

VSHN Co-Founder Aarno Aukia will sit down with Jonas Schwegler from MariaDB to talk about what digital sovereignty actually looks like in practice, not as a buzzword, but as an architecture decision for your data layer.

What we’ll cover

• How a unified MariaDB Enterprise architecture, combined with MaxScale’s zero-downtime failover, delivers the kind of reliability that compliance frameworks expect
• Why Swiss-hosted OpenShift operations matter for organisations that want a sovereign substrate for AI: RAG pipelines, native vector search, and agentic workloads, all without public cloud lock-in
• How to consolidate transactional, analytical, and AI workloads into a single engine, cutting out the ETL complexity that usually 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 if they’re managed deliberately. Too often, MariaDB Community deployments grow organically until nobody’s quite sure which version is running where, whether it’s patched, or what happens if it fails at 3am. Sovereignty isn’t just about where your data lives; it’s about whether you can actually stand behind the reliability, security, and compliance posture of the systems running it.

A bonus for attendees

Everyone who registers for the webinar qualifies for a joint MariaDB & VSHN Estate Health Check, which also unlocks an invitation to an upcoming in-person technical session in Zurich with Aarno Aukia and Monty Widenius, founders of VSHN and MariaDB respectively.

Register now for Thursday, October 1, 11:00 AM – 12:00 PM (CEST)