Changes and Improvements in MariaDB 10.8

MariaDB 10.8 is a previous short-term maintenance series. The first stable release was in May 2022, and it was maintained for one year.

Upgrading

• See Upgrading Between Major MariaDB Versions and Upgrading from MariaDB 10.7 to MariaDB 10.8.

New Features & Improvements

Stored Procedures INOUT Parameters

• Stored procedures already have support for the IN, OUT and INOUT parameter qualifiers. Added as well for stored functions and (IN only) cursors (MDEV-10654). This was a contribution by ManoharKB.

Lag free ALTER TABLE in replication

• Normally, ALTER TABLE gets fully executed on the primary first and only then it is replicated and starts executing on replicas. With this feature ALTER TABLE gets replicated and starts executing on replicas when it starts executing on the primary, not when it finishes. This way the replication lag caused by a heavy ALTER TABLE can be completely eliminated (MDEV-11675).

Descending indexes

• Individual columns in the index can now be explicitly sorted in the ascending or descending order. This can be useful for optimizing certain ORDER BY cases (MDEV-13756, MDEV-26938, MDEV-26939, MDEV-26996).

InnoDB redo log improvements

• autosize innodb_buffer_pool_chunk_size (MDEV-25342).
• Improve the redo log for concurrency (MDEV-14425).
• Remove FIL_PAGE_FILE_FLUSH_LSN (MDEV-27199).

JSON Histograms

• Histograms in the statistics tables are more precise and stored as JSON, not binary (MDEV-21130, MDEV-26519, blog post).

Spider Storage Engine Improvements

• This was mostly internal refactoring work. As a result one can now declare Spider connections using the REMOTE_SERVER, REMOTE_DATABASE, and REMOTE_TABLE attributes and not abuse the COMMENT field for that. This works both for the whole table and per partition (MDEV-5271, MDEV-27106).

Misc. features

• Add an optional argument to the CRC32() function, as well as the CRC32C() function, which uses the Castagnoli polynomial. (MDEV-27208). Note: The order of the 2-ary arguments was swapped after the preview release: crc32('MariaDB')=crc32(crc32('Maria'),'DB')
• Deprecate the keep_files_on_create variable (MDEV-23570).
• my_print_defaults now handles --default-* options in exactly the same way as other MariaDB tools (MDEV-26238).
• UCA collations are now notably faster (MDEV-27266, MDEV-27265).

mysqlbinlog GTID support

• mariadb-binlog (or mysqlbinlog as it was called back when the task was created) now supports both filtering events by GTID ranges through --start-position and --stop-position, and validating a binary log's ordering of GTIDs through --gtid-strict-mode (MDEV-4989).

Windows - Improved i18n support

• On newer versions of Windows (Windows 10 1903 or later), the mariadb client defaults to the utf8mb4 character set. Several problems with Unicode input and output in client were fixed. Command line utilities now accept all Unicode characters in user names, database names, file names etc (in the past, characters were restricted to the current ANSI codepage).

Variables

• For a list of all new variables, see System Variables Added in MariaDB 10.8.

Security Vulnerabilities Fixed in MariaDB 10.8

List of All MariaDB 10.8 Releases