MariaDB 11.4.0 Release Notes

Release date: 23 December 2023

MariaDB 11.4 is an upcoming short-term development series of MariaDB, and will be maintained for one year after its Generally Available release. It is an evolution of MariaDB 11.3 with several entirely new features.

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

Thanks, and enjoy MariaDB!

Partitioning

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

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 (MDEV-24486). 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 that lists only privileges granted on the table level.

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 the dedicated Spider table options (implemented in 11.3). Abusing the table COMMENT clause is now deprecated (MDEV-28861)

Miscellaneous

• CONV() function now supports conversion up to the base 62 (MDEV-30879).

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 (MDEV-31404). The implementation is based on the patch from Percona
• 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 the new value for the binlog_row_image variable, which essentially works like FULL, that is all columns included in the event, but takes less space, because after image omits columns that were not changes by the UPDATE statement and have same values as in the before image (MDEV-32589). This is a contribution from Alibaba
• mariadb-binlog --flashback support for the FULL_NODUP mode (MDEV-32894). This is a contribution from Alibaba
• MariaDB can optionally maintain a special index of gtid's and their location in the binary log. If enabled, it allows to find very quickly where a new connecting slave should start replicating from (MDEV-4991). Without an index this required scanning the binlog. This is a contribution by Kristian Nielsen
• 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

• TIMESTAMP range of values was extended. The maximal allowed value for timestamps was '2038-01-19 03:14:07 UTC', and will now be '2106-02-07 06:28:15 UTC' (MDEV-32188). 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, excluding Windows (the actual requirement is sizeof(long)==8).