Differences in Available Plugins for Enterprise Server

Plugin Evolution Across Enterprise Releases

The availability, maturity, and package inclusions of plugins continuously change from version to version to maintain a predictable operational ecosystem:

MariaDB Enterprise Server 11.8

• caching_sha2_password Plugin: This authentication plugin was added to provide MySQL-compatible authentication, allowing users to be moved from MySQL to MariaDB without changing their passwords (it is not installed by default).

• PARSEC Plugin: Available in MariaDB Enterprise Server 11.8.

• HashiCorp Vault Upgrade: Namespace support was added to HashiCorp Vault to integrate with HashiCorp enterprise namespaces.

• file_key_management Encryption Plugin: This plugin can now read keys from a Unix socket instead of just local files. It also added key rotation capability along with a new Information Schema table named FILE_KEY_MANAGEMENT_KEYS.

• Enterprise Audit Buffering: Audit logging buffer writes are now possible, controlled by the server_audit_file_buffer_size variable and manually flushed using server_audit_sync_log_file.

MariaDB Enterprise Server 11.4

• PARSEC Authentication: This plugin (Password Authentication using Response Signed with Elliptic Curve) is included as a backported feature. It uses salted passwords, pbkdf2 key derivation, and signed responses to mitigate replay and man-in-the-middle attacks.

• password_reuse_check Plugin: Included as a backported feature to prevent users from reusing previous passwords. (Note: Upgrading this plugin to version 2.0 alters the data storage format to fix a weakness under MDEV-28838, which invalidates older v1.0 history).

• SQL Error Log Plugin: Enhanced to display the active thread ID and the default schema for errors when sql_error_log_with_db_and_thread_info=ON is set.

MariaDB Enterprise Server 10.6

• Object Filtering for Audit: Advanced filtering was added to MariaDB Enterprise Audit, allowing administrators to define JSON filters (ignore_databases, ignore_tables, log_databases, log_tables) to restrict logging to specific databases or tables. This capability was also backported to ES 10.5.12-8 and ES 10.4.21-13.

MariaDB Enterprise Server 10.5

• ColumnStore Storage Engine Plugin: MariaDB ColumnStore 5 was introduced as an integrated enterprise plugin to provide distributed columnar storage for analytical workloads.

• Spider Storage Engine Plugin: Updated to support an ODBC foreign data wrapper and added the information_schema.SPIDER_WRAPPER_PROTOCOLS system table.

• Plugin Phase-outs & Repository Splits:

  • TokuDB and Cassandra: Both storage engine plugins were completely phased out and removed from installation packages.

  • CONNECT Storage Engine: Moved from the main Enterprise repository to an "unsupported" repository. To ensure it functions, you must explicitly include the --include-unsupported flag in the mariadb_es_repo_setup script, or else the library ha_connect.so will be unavailable.

MariaDB Enterprise Server 10.4

• Aria System Tables: System tables transitioned to use the crash-safe Aria storage engine plugin by default.

• Multi-Plugin Authentication: Added the ability to specify multiple authentication plugins for an individual user account using OR fallback constraints (e.g., executing IDENTIFIED VIA unix_socket OR mysql_native_password).

Querying Plugin Information

Because your specific installation state depends on repository definitions (such as whether the unsupported repository is active), documentation can diverge from real-time database deployments. You can dynamically query plugin availability via the following database interface methods:

Using SHOW PLUGINS

The simplest statement to review all loaded plugins and identify hard-coded components:

SHOW PLUGINS;

Mechanic: If a plugin's Library column returns a NULL value, the plugin is natively built-in and cannot be uninstalled.

Using information_schema.PLUGINS

To filter plugins systematically by maturity level, type, or library names:

SELECT PLUGIN_NAME, 
       PLUGIN_STATUS, 
       PLUGIN_TYPE, 
       PLUGIN_MATURITY,
       PLUGIN_LIBRARY 
FROM information_schema.PLUGINS 
WHERE PLUGIN_STATUS = 'ACTIVE'
ORDER BY PLUGIN_NAME;

Mechanic: If the PLUGIN_LIBRARY column is NULL, the plugin is built-in and cannot be uninstalled.

Using mysql.plugin

To see exactly which plugins have been explicitly installed onto the database system registry:

SELECT name, dl FROM mysql.plugin;

Critical Nuance: This table only retains records for plugins explicitly loaded via the INSTALL SONAME statement, the INSTALL PLUGIN statement, or the offline mariadb-plugin utility. It does not contain information about built-in plugins or plugins loaded temporarily at server startup using the --plugin-load or --plugin-load-add configuration options.