Upgrading from MariaDB 5.3 to MariaDB 5.5

What you need to know

There are no changes in table or index formats between MariaDB 5.3 and MariaDB 5.5, so on most servers the upgrade should be painless.

How to upgrade

The suggested upgrade procedure is:

1. For Windows, see Upgrading MariaDB on Windows instead.
2. Shutdown MariaDB 5.3
3. Take a backup (this is the perfect time to take a backup of your databases)
4. Uninstall MariaDB 5.3
5. Install MariaDB 5.5 ^[1]
6. Run mysql_upgrade
   • Ubuntu and Debian packages do this automatically when they are installed; Red Hat, CentOS, and Fedora packages do not
   • mysql_upgrade does two things:
     1. Upgrades the permission tables in the mysql database with some new fields
     2. Does a very quick check of all tables and marks them as compatible with MariaDB 5.5
   • In most cases this should be a fast operation (depending of course on the number of tables)
7. Add new options to my.cnf to enable features
   • If you change my.cnf then you need to restart mysqld

Incompatible changes between 5.3 and 5.5

As mentioned previously, on most servers upgrading from 5.5 should be painless. However, there are some things that have changed which could affect an upgrade:

XtraDB options that have changed default values

Options that have been removed or renamed

Percona, the provider of XtraDB, does not provide all earlier XtraDB features in the 5.5 code base. Because of that, MariaDB 5.5 can't provide them either. The following options are not supported by XtraDB 5.5. If you are using them in any of your my.cnf files, you should remove them before upgrading to 5.5.

• innodb_adaptive_checkpoint; Use innodb_adaptive_flushing_method instead.
• innodb_auto_lru_dump; Use innodb_buffer_pool_restore_at_startup instead (and innodb_buffer_pool_load_at_startup in MariaDB 10.0).
• innodb_blocking_lru_restore; Use innodb_blocking_buffer_pool_restore instead.
• innodb_enable_unsafe_group_commit
• innodb_expand_import; Use innodb_import_table_from_xtrabackup instead.
• innodb_extra_rsegments; Use innodb_rollback_segments instead.
• innodb_extra_undoslots
• innodb_fast_recovery
• innodb_flush_log_at_trx_commit_session
• innodb_overwrite_relay_log_info
• innodb_pass_corrupt_table; Use innodb_corrupt_table_action instead.
• innodb_use_purge_thread
• xtradb_enhancements

Notes

1. ↑ If using a MariaDB apt or yum repository, it is often enough to replace instances of '5.3' with '5.5' and then run an update/upgrade. For example, in Ubuntu/Debian update the MariaDB sources.list entry from something that looks similar to this:

   deb http://ftp.osuosl.org/pub/mariadb/repo/5.3/ubuntu trusty main
   

   To something like this:

   deb http://ftp.osuosl.org/pub/mariadb/repo/5.5/ubuntu trusty main
   

   And then run

   apt-get update && apt-get upgrade
   

   And in Red Hat, CentOS, and Fedora, change the baseurl line from something that looks like this:

   baseurl = http://yum.mariadb.org/5.3/centos6-amd64
   

   To something that looks like this:

   baseurl = http://yum.mariadb.org/5.5/centos6-amd64
   

   And then run

   yum update
   

See also

• The features in MariaDB 5.5
• Perconas guide of how to upgrade to 5.5