MariaDB 5.2.2-gamma is released

MariaDB 5.2.2-gamma is released

MariaDB 5.2 is finally released as gamma (RC). I had hoped to release this in July at Oscon but our new QA person, Philip Stoev, find at the last moment some problems with Aria recovery and virtual columns that we wanted to fix before doing the release.

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, we don't expect any big problems with 5.2 and we should be able to declare it stable within a few months.

5.2.2 gamma is based on MariaDB/MySQL version 5.1.50. It has the following 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 70% 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.

New storage engines:

OQGRAPH (experimental quality)

Allows you to handle hierarchies (tree structures) and complex graphs (nodes having many connections in several directions).

Sphinx, a text-search engine (experimental quality)

A built-in Sphinx client which allows MariaDB to talk to searchd, run search queries, and obtain search results.

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

We will now continue with working on MariaDB 5.3. As soon as MySQL 5.5 is stable enough, we will create a MariaDB 5.5 tree (based on MariaDB 5.3 + MySQL 5.5) and start working on that.

Please download MariaDB 5.2, test and give us feedback on maria-discuss@lists.launchpad.net or file a bug. We believe it's already quite stable, but we will only know after we have enough users testing it!