Rust

The Rust connector for MariaDB provides two community-maintained crates for building native Rust applications that connect to MariaDB databases, with MariaDB-specific features contributed directly by

Overview

Rust applications can connect to MariaDB using the community-maintained drivers from the blackbeam project. These are not official MariaDB connectors, but MariaDB has contributed MariaDB-specific features to them, and they are the recommended way to connect to MariaDB from Rust.

The Rust ecosystem has two widely used community-maintained MySQL/MariaDB client crates:

mysql (rust-mysql-simple) — a synchronous Rust driver
mysql_async — an asynchronous Rust driver built on Tokio

Both crates share a common protocol implementation library, rust_mysql_common, which handles low-level MySQL/MariaDB protocol primitives, value conversion, and authentication primitives used by both drivers.

MariaDB recommends these Rust crates, which provide robust MySQL‑protocol compatibility and include MariaDB‑specific enhancements for first‑class client support.

Select the driver based on your application’s architecture: use mysql for blocking/synchronous I/O, or mysql_async for non‑blocking I/O with Tokio. Both drivers have received the same MariaDB-specific contributions for the features described below.

Why MariaDB Recommends These Crates

While other Rust crates implement the MySQL protocol, and some have higher download counts on crates.io, MariaDB evaluated several available crates based on internal connector benchmarks. The mysql and mysql_async crates performed well in these evaluations and already included native support for MariaDB-specific features, such as the ed25519 authentication plugin, before MariaDB began contributing to them directly.

MariaDB-Specific Contributions

MariaDB has contributed MariaDB‑specific features directly to these crates. The following features have been implemented and incorporated into the official releases (mysql_async v0.37.0 and the corresponding rust‑mysql‑simple version):

1. PARSEC Authentication Plugin Support

PARSEC (Password Authentication using Response Signed with Elliptic Curve) is a modern authentication plugin introduced in MariaDB 11.6. It uses salted passwords, PBKDF2 key derivation, and ed25519 elliptic-curve signatures to prevent replay attacks and protect credentials.

Both mysql_async and mysql (sync) now support PARSEC authentication natively. When connecting to a MariaDB 11.6+ server configured to use the parsec authentication plugin, the driver will automatically handle the PARSEC handshake without any special configuration from the application developer.

2. Bulk Execution (`COM_STMT_BULK_EXECUTE`)

MariaDB supports a protocol extension called COM_STMT_BULK_EXECUTE, enabled via the MARIADB_CLIENT_STMT_BULK_OPERATIONS capability flag. This allows a client to execute a previously prepared statement with multiple rows of parameters in a single network round-trip, rather than sending one execution packet per row.

This feature is specific to MariaDB. When the driver connects to a MariaDB server that indicates support for the MARIADB_CLIENT_STMT_BULK_OPERATIONS capability, bulk execution is automatically negotiated and used for batch inserts or updates.

The benefit is significant performance improvement for write-heavy workloads, reducing network overhead and server round-trips.

3. Metadata Skipping (`MARIADB_CLIENT_CACHE_METADATA`)

Since MariaDB 10.6, the server supports a binary protocol optimization where result-set column metadata is not re-sent if it has not changed between executions of a prepared statement. This is negotiated via the MARIADB_CLIENT_CACHE_METADATA capability.

Both drivers now support this optimization. When connected to MariaDB 10.6+, the driver caches the column metadata on the first execution of a prepared statement and skips receiving it on subsequent executions — reducing network payload and parsing overhead on every repeated query.

Crate Reference Summary

Crate

Type

Description

MariaDB Features

mysql

Sync

rust-mysql-simple; blocking I/O

PARSEC auth, bulk execute, metadata skip

mysql_async

Async

Tokio-based async driver

PARSEC auth, bulk execute, metadata skip

mysql_common

Shared

Protocol primitives, value types, auth

Used internally by both drivers

Note: rust_mysql_common is a shared dependency and does not need to be added to your Cargo.toml directly. It is pulled in automatically by either mysql or mysql_async.

Installation

Sync driver:

[dependencies]
mysql = "*"

MariaDB Server Version Requirements

Feature

Minimum MariaDB Version

Metadata skipping

10.6

PARSEC authentication

11.6

Bulk execution (COM_STMT_BULK_EXECUTE)

All features are automatically negotiated during the connection handshake based on what the server announces; no application‑side configuration is needed."