MariaDB 10.2 GA released with several advanced features

MariaDB 10.2.6 GA is now released. It's a release where we have concentrated on adding new advanced features to MariaDB

The most noteworthy ones are:

• Windows Functions gives you the ability to do advanced calculation over a sliding window.
• Common table expressions allows you to do more complex SQL statements without having to do explicit temporary tables.
• We finally have a DEFAULT clause that can take expressions and also CHECK CONSTRAINT.
• Multiple triggers for the same event. This is important for anyone trying to use tools, like pt-online-schema-change, which requires multiple triggers for the same table.
• A new storage engine, MyRocks, that gives you high compression of your data without sacrificing speed. It has been developed in cooperation with Facebook and MariaDB to allow you to handle more data with less resources.
• flashback, a feature that can rollback instances/databases/tables to an old snapshot. The version in MariaDB 10.2 is DML only. In MariaDB 10.3 we will also allow rollback over DML (like DROP TABLE).
• Compression of events in the binary log.
• JSON functions added. In 10.2.7 we will also add support for CREATE TABLE ... (a JSON).

A few smaller but still noteworthy new features:

• Connection setup was made faster by moving creation of THD to a new thread. This, in addition with better thread caching, can give a connection speedup for up to 85 % in some cases.
• Table cache can automatically partition itself as needed to reduce the contention.
• NO PAD collations, which means that end space are significant in comparisons.
• InnoDB is now the default storage engine. Until MariaDB 10.1, MariaDB used the XtraDB storage engine as default. XtraDB in 10.2 is not up to date with the latest features of InnoDB and cannot be used. The main reason for this change is that most of the important features of XtraDB are nowadays implemented in InnoDB . As the MariaDB team is doing a lot more InnoDB development than ever before, we can't anymore manage updating two almost identical engines. The InnoDB version in MariaDB contains the best features of MySQL InnoDB and XtraDB and a lot more. As the InnoDB on disk format is identical to XtraDB's this will not cause any problems when upgrading to MariaDB 10.2
• The old GPL client library is gone; now MariaDB Server comes with the LGPL Connector/C client library.

There are a lot of other new features, performance enhancements and variables in MariaDB 10.2 for you to explore!

I am happy to see that a lot of the new features have come from the MariadB community! (Note to myself; This list doesn't include all contributors to MariadB 10.2, needs to be update.)

Thanks a lot to everyone that has contributed to MariaDB!

MariaDB 10.3-alpha released

While most of the MariaDB developers have been working hard on getting MariaDB 10.2 out as GA, a small team, including me, has been working on the next release, MariaDB 10.3.

The theme of MariaDB 10.2 is complex operations, like window functions, common table expressions, JSON functions, the theme of MariaDB 10.3 is compatibility.

Compatibility refers to functionality that exist in other databases but have been missing in MariaDB:

• Enhanced ORACLE compatibility mode (PL/SQL compatibility)
• INTERSECT and EXCEPT
• SEQUENCE support
  • CREATE SEQUENCE
  • DROP SEQUENCE
  • NEXT VALUE FOR
  • PREVIOUS VALUE FOR
• ROW data type for stored routine variables
• TYPE OF and ROW TYPE OF anchored data types for stored routine variables
• Cursors with parameters
• SELECT FOR UPDATE WAIT
• DDL FAST FAIL

In MariaDB 10.2 ORACLE mode was limited to removing MariaDB specific options in SHOW CREATE TABLE, SHOW CREATE VIEW and setting SQL_MODE to "PIPES_AS_CONCAT, ANSI_QUOTES, IGNORE_SPACE, ORACLE, NO_KEY_OPTIONS, NO_TABLE_OPTIONS, NO_FIELD_OPTIONS, NO_AUTO_CREATE_USER".

In MariaDB 10.3, SQL_MODE=ORACLE mode allows MariaDB to understand a large subset of Oracle's PL/SQL language. The documentation for what is supported is still lacking, but the interested can find what is supported in the test suite in the "mysql-test/suite/compat/oracle" directory.

If things go as planned, the features we will add to 10.3 prior to beta are:

• Hidden columns
• Full Package support. A package is a schema object that groups logically related PL/SQL data types, items (e.g. variables, cursors, exceptions) and subprograms.
• Aggregate Stored Function
• Server Proxy Protocol
• Update Spider to latest version
• AS OF / temporal tables. This will allow you to access data as it was at a specific point in time.
• Galera 4.0 (depending on Codership)

Most of the above features are already close to be ready (to be added in future Alphas), so I expect that it willl not take many months before we can make a first MariaDB 10.3 beta!

This is in line what was discussed on the MariaDB developer conference in New York one week ago, where most attendees wanted to see new MariaDB releases more often.

MariaDB 10.3 can be downloaded here

Happy testing!