Changes and Improvements in MariaDB 11.8

MariaDB 11.8 is a long-term release series, maintained until Jun 2028.

This list includes all features since the previous long-term release, MariaDB 11.4 (those introduced in the MariaDB 11.5, MariaDB 11.6 and MariaDB 11.7 rolling releases and in MariaDB 11.8).

Upgrading

• Note that if you are using system versioned tables, all rows and indexes has to be updated in these to use the extended timestamp range ('2106-02-07 06:28:15 UTC'). Upgrading to 11.8 can take a long time if you have many rows in your system versioned tables!
• If you are not using system versioned tables and you are upgrading from 10.0 and up, the upgrade should just take a few seconds.

Downgrading

• If you have system versioned tables, downgrading is not trivial. In other cases see downgrading between major versions.

New Features

Vectors

• Vector datatype and vector indexing
• Functions VEC_FromText and VEC_ToText,
• Functions VEC_DISTANCE_COSINE, VEC_DISTANCE_EUCLIDEAN, VEC_DISTANCE for calculating either a Euclidean or Cosine distance between two vectors. The last one automatically uses Euclidean or Cosine, depending on the underlying index type (MDEV-35450).
• Vector indexes can use x86_64 (AVX2 and AVX512), aarch64 neon (MDEV-34699) and Powerpc64 AltiVec (MDEV-36184) SIMD instructions.

Character Sets

• The default character set has been changed from latin1 to utf8mb4 (MDEV-19123, MariaDB 11.6)
• Change default Unicode collation to uca1400_ai_ci, a modern Unicode collation with proper support for SMP characters, including emoji (MDEV-25829, MariaDB 11.5)

Optimizer

• Optimization improvement for single-table UPDATE/DELETE: make cost-based choice between subquery strategies (MDEV-25008)
• The Charset Narrowing Optimization is now on by default (MDEV-34380)
• Optimizer can now take advantage of queries of the format SUBSTR(col, 1, n) = const_str (MDEV-34911)
• Add basic optimizer support for virtual columns - see Virtual Column Support in the Optimizer (MDEV-35616)
• Improve selectivity computations for multi-part keys (MDEV-33697, MariaDB 11.6)
• Index condition pushdown is now supported for partitioned tables (MDEV-12404, MariaDB 11.5)
• ANALYZE for statement should show selectivity of pushed index condition (MDEV-18478, MariaDB 11.5)

System-Versioned Tables

• Allow a system-versioned table to be converted from implicit to explicit row_start/row_end columns (MDEV-27293)

Temporary files and tables

• Limit size of created disk temporary files and tables (MDEV-9101, MariaDB 11.5)
  • There are two system variables used for controlling this feature (MariaDB 11.5):
    • max_tmp_session_space_usage: Limits the the temporary space allowance per user
    • max_tmp_total_space_usage: Limits the temporary space allowance for all users.

Data Types

• The TIMESTAMP range of values was extended. The maximal allowed value for timestamps was '2038-01-19 03:14:07 UTC', and is now '2106-02-07 06:28:15 UTC'. This does not change the storage format, and new tables can be read by old MariaDB servers as long as timestamp values are within the old timestamp range. At the moment this is only supported on 64-bit platforms (MDEV-32188, MariaDB 11.5). Note that if you are using system versioned tables, all rows has to be updated in these to use the new end range. This can take a long time if you have many rows in your system versioned tables!

Authentication

• New PARSEC authentication plugin (MDEV-32618, MariaDB 11.6)
• Extend Unix socket authentication to support authentication_string (MDEV-33479, MariaDB 11.6)

InnoDB

• Fix innodb-adaptive-hash-index scalability with multiple threads (MDEV-35049)

Backup and Restore

• Parallel dump of multiple databases via mariadb-dump with the --dir option (MDEV-33625, MariaDB 11.5)
• Parallel import of multiple databases via mariadb-import with the --dir option (MDEV-33627, MariaDB 11.6)
  • Added the related --database, --ignore-database, --table and --ignore-table options.
  • Refactor mariadb-import threading
• The mariadb-dump --no-autocommit option is now set by default to allow faster data loading by InnoDB, writing only one undo log for the whole operation (MDEV-32250)
• mariadb-import has a new option, --innodb-optimize-keys to delay creation of secondary indexes until after data load, resulting in faster loads. On by default. (MDEV-34740)

Replication

• When binlogging is enabled, committing a large transaction no longer freezes all other transactions until completed (MDEV-32014, MariaDB 11.7)
• binlog_optimize_thread_scheduling has been deprecated (MDEV-33756, MariaDB 11.7)
• Asynchronous rollback of prepared transactions during binlog crash recovery (MDEV-33853, MariaDB 11.7)
• New variable, slave_abort_blocking_timeout, for aborting long-running queries on a replica (MDEV-34857, MariaDB 11.7)
• binlog_optimize_thread_scheduling deprecated (MDEV-33756, MariaDB 11.7)
• New definition for Seconds_Behind_Master (MDEV-33856, MariaDB 11.6)
  • Added three variables to SHOW ALL REPLICAS STATUS
  • New Information Schema SLAVE_STATUS Table

Galera

• Automatic SST user account management (MDEV-31809, MariaDB 11.6)

UUID

• New function for generating version 4 UUIDs UUID_v4 (MDEV-11339, MariaDB 11.7)
• New function for generating version 7 UUIDs UUID_v7 (MDEV-32637, MariaDB 11.7)

Other Functions

• New FORMAT_BYTES function. Given a byte count, returns a string consisting of a value and the units in a human-readable format (MDEV-31736)

Protocol

• Permit bulk implementation to return ALL individual results (MDEV-30366, MariaDB 11.5)
• Send initial values of system variables in first OK packet (MDEV-31609, MariaDB 11.5)

Observability

• New USERS table in the Information Schema for storing information about users, password expiry, and the limits set by max_password_errors (MDEV-23729, MDEV-32218, MariaDB 11.5)
• Add more columns to Information Schema TABLE_STATISTICS, CLIENT_STATISTICS and USER STATISTICS tables (MDEV-33151, MariaDB 11.5)
• Add QUERIES column to Information Schema INDEX_STATISTICS table (MDEV-33152, MariaDB 11.5)
• Add FLUSH GLOBAL STATUS (MDEV-33145, MariaDB 11.5)
• Provide InnoDB async IO statistics (MDEV-32841, MariaDB 11.5)
• Show variable deprecation for mariadbd --help output (MDEV-28671, MariaDB 11.5)
• Extend Query Response Time plugin to be compatible with Percona server (MDEV-33501, MariaDB 11.5)

Sequences

• Additional features for Sequences (MDEV-28152, MariaDB 11.5)
  • CREATE SEQUENCE ... AS permits creating as any INT type (including BIGINT UNSIGNED), extending the range
  • Information Schema Sequences table
  • Parser accepts larger and smaller values for MINVALUE and MAXVALUE
• ANALYZE TABLE on sequences no longer attempts to collect statistics (MDEV-33938)

System-Versioned Tables

• Allow a system-versioned table to be converted from implicit to explicit row_start/row_end columns (MDEV-27293, MariaDB 11.7)

Stored Routines

• ROW data type for stored function return values (MDEV-12252, MariaDB 11.7)

Derived Tables

• Add optional correlation column list for derived tables (MDEV-31466, MariaDB 11.7)

[SHOW] CREATE SERVER

• Implement SHOW CREATE SERVER (MDEV-15696, MariaDB 11.7)
• Allow arbitrary options in CREATE SERVER (MDEV-34716, MariaDB 11.7)

Slow Query Log

• New variable, log_slow_always_query_time, for specifying that all queries longer than this time are logged to the slow query log, regardless of log_slow_min_examined_row_limit and log_slow_rate_limit (MDEV-33144, MariaDB 11.7)

Information Schema

• When querying the information Schema, stored functions that have the same name as a native function no longer generate a warning (MDEV-35437)

Spider

• The Spider variables spider_table_crd_thread_count and spider_table_sts_thread_count have been deprecated (MDEV-28009, MariaDB 11.7)
• Deprecate spider_casual_read (MDEV-31789, MariaDB 11.5)

General

• SESSION_USER(), which used to be an alias for USER() now shows the value of CURRENT_USER() when the session was created (MDEV-30908, MariaDB 11.7)
• CURRENT_TIMESTAMP should return a TIMESTAMP (WITH TIME ZONE?) (MDEV-15751, MariaDB 11.7)
• A warning has been added when max_sort_length is exceeded. (MDEV-27277, MariaDB 11.7)
• Single-table DELETEs now support table aliases (MDEV-33988, MariaDB 11.6)
• Set thread names for MariaDB Server threads (MDEV-32537, MariaDB 11.6)
• REPAIR TABLE ... FORCE (MDEV-33449, MariaDB 11.5)

Variables

• Deprecate and ignore the alter_algorithm system variable (MDEV-33655, MariaDB 11.5)
• For a list of all new variables, see System Variables Added in MariaDB 11.8

Removed Features

The following deprecated features have been removed:

• <data type> <character set clause> ... COMPRESSED... (MariaDB 11.5)
  • the correct syntax is <data type> COMPRESSED... <character set clause> ...
• wsrep_load_data_splitting (MariaDB 11.5)
• integer latches in OQGraph (and the related oqgraph_allow_create_integer_latch variable). (MariaDB 11.5)

List of All MariaDB 11.8 Releases