What is MariaDB 5.2

MariaDB 5.2 contains features that didn't have time to go into MariaDB 5.1.

MariaDB 5.2 is based on MariaDB 5.1 and thus MySQL 5.1.

The new features in 5.2 are quite isolated and as most have been in use by members in the MySQL community for a long time, we don't expect any big problems with 5.2 and we should be able to declare it stable within a few months.

New storage engines

• OQGRAPH
  • Allows you to handle hierarchies (tree structures) and complex graphs (nodes having many connections in several directions)
• SphinxSE: Text search withing MariaDB.
  • A built-in Sphinx client which allows MariaDB to talk to searchd, run search queries, and obtain search results.

New features

• Virtual columns
  • Columns that are an expression and are calculated on retrieval.
• Extended User Statistics
  • Client, User, Index and Table statistics.
• Segmented MyISAM key cache
  • The key cache's global mutex is split into several mutex which gives a notable speed improvement under multi user load. We have registered up to 250% more performance thanks to this.
• Pluggable Authentication
  • Authentication is done via an extensible plugin, which makes it easy to add any kind of authentication to MariaDB.
• Storage-engine-specific CREATE TABLE
  • Allows one to specify additional attributes per field, index or table to the storage engine.
• Enhancements to INFORMATION SCHEMA.PLUGINS table
  • We expose more information about the plugins, like maturity levels.
• Group commit for the Aria engine.
  • Speeds up multi user inserts.

Other things

We have also done several smaller speed improvements, bug fixes and code cleanups.