Changes & Improvements in MariaDB 5.2

MariaDB 5.2 contains features that didn't have time to go into MariaDB 5.1. For all practical purposes it's a drop in replacement for MariaDB 5.1 (and thus MySQL 5.1).

MariaDB 5.2 is based on MariaDB 5.1 and thus MySQL 5.1.

The new features in 5.2 are quite isolated and as most have been in use by members in the MySQL community for a long time. Current versions of MariaDB 5.2 are stable and can be downloaded from http://downloads.askmonty.org.

New storage engines

• OQGRAPH
  • Allows you to handle hierarchies (tree structures) and complex graphs (nodes having many connections in several directions)
• SphinxSE: Text search within MariaDB.
  • A built-in Sphinx client which allows MariaDB to talk to searchd, run search queries, and obtain search results.

New features

• Virtual columns
  • Columns that are an expression and are calculated on retrieval.
• Extended User Statistics
  • Client, User, Index and Table statistics.
• Segmented MyISAM key cache
  • The key cache's global mutex is split into several mutex which gives a notable speed improvement under multi user load. We have registered up to 250% more performance thanks to this.
• Pluggable Authentication
  • Authentication is done via an extensible plugin, which makes it easy to add any kind of authentication to MariaDB.
• Storage-engine-specific CREATE TABLE
  • Allows one to specify additional attributes per field, index or table to the storage engine.
• Enhancements to INFORMATION SCHEMA.PLUGINS table
  • We expose more information about the plugins, like maturity levels.
• Group commit for the Aria engine.
  • Speeds up multi user inserts.

Other things

We have also done several smaller speed improvements, bug fixes and code cleanups.

Security Vulnerabilities Fixed in MariaDB 5.2