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). It also shipped in the Enterprise Server 11.4 maintenance series.

• 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 named pipe 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, with synchronous flushing of buffered writes to disk controlled by 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 Enterprise Server 10.5.12-8 and Enterprise Server 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 removed from the installation packages in 10.5. They were subsequently removed from the server codebase entirely in 10.6.

  • 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.

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