MariaDB 11.4.0 Release Notes

Download Release Notes Changelog Overview of 11.4

Release date: 24 December 2023

MariaDB 11.4 is a long-term development series of MariaDB. It is an evolution of MariaDB 11.3 with several entirely new features.

MariaDB 11.4.0 is a single preview release. Features are to be considered preview, and none are guaranteed to make it into MariaDB 11.4.

The preview is available as a container quay.io/mariadb-foundation/mariadb-devel:11.4.

Thanks, and enjoy MariaDB!

Partitioning

• ALTER TABLE … EXCHANGE PARTITION and ALTER TABLE … CONVERT TABLE … TO now support the WITH VALIDATION and WITHOUT VALIDATION clauses. If neither is specified, the default behavior is WITH VALIDATION (MDEV-22164)

Sys Schema

• New view sys.privileges_by_table_by_level shows granted privileges broken down by table on which they allow access and level on which they were granted. For example, if a user x has SELECT privilege granted ON db.*, this view will list all tables in the db schema with the user x having SELECT privilege on them. This is different from INFORMATION_SCHEMA.TABLE_PRIVILEGES, which only lists privileges granted on the table level (MDEV-24486)

Optimizer

• Not only ascending, but also descending indexes can now be used to optimize MIN() and MAX() (MDEV-27576)

Spider

• The preferred way to specify Spider parameters is to use the dedicated Spider table options (implemented in MariaDB 11.3). Abusing the table COMMENT clause is now deprecated (MDEV-28861)

Miscellaneous

• CONV() function now supports conversion up to base 62 (MDEV-30879)
• Added support for packages (CREATE PACKAGE) outside of ORACLE sql_mode (MDEV-32101)

Replication

• Binary log writing speed was improved by moving checksum calculations out of the global binlog mutex (MDEV-31273). This is a contribution by Kristian Nielsen
• New system variable max_binlog_total_size enables binary log purging when the total size of all binary logs exceeds the specified threshold. The implementation is based on the patch from Percona (MDEV-31404)
• New system variable slave_connections_needed_for_purge disables binary log purging until the number of connected slaves reaches the specified threshold (MDEV-31404).
• FULL_NODUP is a new value for the binlog_row_image system variable. It essentially works like FULL, that is all columns are included in the event, but it takes less space, because the after image omits columns that were not changed by the UPDATE statement, and have same values as in the before image. This is a contribution from Alibaba (MDEV-32589)
• mariadb-binlog --flashback support for the FULL_NODUP mode. This is a contribution from Alibaba (MDEV-32894).
• MariaDB can optionally maintain a special index of GTIDs and their location in the binary log. If enabled (the default), it allows finding very quickly where a new connecting replica should start replicating from. Without an index, this required scanning the binlog. This is a contribution by Kristian Nielsen (MDEV-4991).
• Note that this feature was not included in MariaDB 11.4. GTID events in the binary log now include connection id of the client connection that generated the event. This allows mariadb-binlog to tag all row events with a corresponding connection id (MDEV-7850).

Data Types

• The TIMESTAMP range of values was extended. The maximal allowed value for timestamps was '2038-01-19 03:14:07 UTC', and is now '2106-02-07 06:28:15 UTC'. This does not change the storage format, and new tables can be read by old MariaDB servers as long as timestamp values are within the old timestamp range. At the moment this is only supported on 64-bit platforms (MDEV-32188). This was not included in MariaDB 11.4.