Announcing MariaDB Community Server 10.7 GA and 10.8 RC

Posted on February 9, 2022 by

We are happy to announce MariaDB Community Server 10.7 as GA (Generally Available) and the first RC (Release Candidate) of MariaDB Community Server 10.8. These releases have occurred in alignment to the previously-announced quarterly Innovation Release Model.

MariaDB Community Server 10.7 now GA

MariaDB Community Server 10.7.2 is the first GA release of the 10.7 release series. To reach GA, preview releases were made available to the community for early access to key new features, followed by the RC release in early November, 2021. The new features of MariaDB Community Server 10.7 were covered in the release candidate announcement blog.

MariaDB Community Server 10.8 now RC

The first MariaDB Community Server 10.8 Release Candidate (RC) is available today with new features.

To help reach RC maturity, Feature Preview Releases were made available for MariaDB Community Server 10.8 at the end of December, 2021. Thanks to feedback from community testing, and after extensive internal tests, we are now ready to release the Release Candidate. We are glad to say most preview features matured sufficiently to be included in the release.

New Features in Community Server 10.8 RC

For Developers

  • MariaDB Server now supports descending indexes. Composite indexes can be used with differently ordered columns to get a significant performance boost in the corresponding  ORDER BY use cases.
  • Stored Functions qualifiers for IN, OUT, INOUT, and IN OUT.
    The qualifiers are following the syntax already used for stored procedures and take the differences for Oracle into account when using the Oracle compatibility mode (sql_mode=ORACLE).
    This enhancement is based on a community contribution by Manohar KB of Rakuten Securities.

For DevOps and DBAs

  • New optimistic ALTER TABLE for replicas. When enabled by binlog_alter_two_phase = 1 (not default), an ALTER TABLE is executed on the primary server and is replicated and “started” on the replica server more or less in parallel to the primary server. Thus, the possibly huge replication lag between a primary and replica server due to a long running ALTER TABLE on the primary can be avoided.
  • The command line tool mariadb-binlog now supports the use of global transaction IDs (GTID) for the options start-position and stop-position.
    mariadb-binlog can now be used to produce results filtered by the defined GTIDs.
  • The SPIDER storage engine now allows the use of engine-defined attributes (table options), similar to other storage engines and more convenient than the current method of providing parameters via COMMENT for a table.
  • Engine-defined attributes can now also be defined per-partition for more flexible configurations.

Server Improvements

  • Implementation of JSON histograms with detailed histogram collection, used when histogram_type=JSON_HB (not the default) is set. Using JSON histograms results in more precise data statistics over string data types or when columns have highly-uneven data distribution. More precise statistics allow the optimizer to create better query plans resulting in faster queries.
  • Changes to the InnoDB redo log format to reduce write amplification, which can result in better performance.
  • MariaDB Server can now be built with the OpenSSL 3.0 library.
  • Full unicode support for MariaDB command-line tools on recent versions of Windows (Windows 10 1909 or later, Windows 11, Windows Server 2020 supported). The server my.ini config file is now also encoded in UTF8. Command-line client mariadb.exe uses utf8mb4 by default.

We encourage you to Try MariaDB Community Server 10.8 RC today. Please note that we do not recommend running RC releases in production.

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