MariaDB Enterprise Server 10.5 Now GA

MariaDB Enterprise Server is the key component of MariaDB Platform. The newest major release of MariaDB Enterprise Server 10.5 delivers increased performance and expanded capabilities including distributed SQL, improved analytics integration and management, and additional security features.

Improved Analytics

MariaDB Enterprise Server 10.5 includes MariaDB Enterprise ColumnStore 1.5 RC, the newest major version of our columnar engine for analytics. Together with MaxScale, MariaDB Enterprise Server supports distributed multi-node ColumnStore configurations. The newest version of ColumnStore includes easier installation and configuration as well as improved collation and character sets.

Rewrite of InnoDB in MariaDB

In the past year, our team has engineered a substantial refactoring of the InnoDB storage engine, the default storage engine for MariaDB Server. Led by Marko Mäkela, who has been developing InnoDB internals since 2003, the team has:

  • optimized tablespace handling
  • updated the change buffer implementation for better performance with modern workloads
  • improved the redo log for faster, more efficient backup and restore
  • moved background tasks to threadpool implementation for increased performance

Enterprise only features include allowing dynamic changes to the following system variables:

  • innodb_purge_threads so the number of purge threads can be scaled without a server restart
  • innodb_log_file_size, so the InnoDB redo log size can be scaled without a server restart
  • innodb_read_io_threads, so the number of read I/O threads can be scaled without a server restart
  • innodb_write_io_threads, so the number of write I/O threads can be scaled without a server restart

Marko presented a webinar about the changes and has written a blog. We also have more details in our documentation.

Security Enhancements

MariaDB Enterprise Server 10.5 includes several new security enhancements. We’ve added a new option to enforce TLS for all TCP connections. Another exciting feature is that we have decided to split up the SUPER privilege to allow finer grained control over what users can do. This allows the creation of admin user accounts with very specific roles without the full power of the SUPER privilege. There are now privilege levels such as BINLOG ADMIN and CONNECTION ADMIN among other similar sets that grant privileges for the operations required to do those jobs.

This release also introduces a key management service to allow HashiCorp Vault to manage encryption keys for data-at-rest encryption. Both the open source and enterprise editions of HashiCorp Vault are supported.

General Enhancements

We’ve added lots of other improvement to MariaDB Enterprise Server including:

MariaDB Name

And finally, as we continue to move into the future of MariaDB Platform providing flexible modern open source solutions to meet enterprise needs, MariaDB Enterprise Server 10.5 includes more mariadb-named executables as we take more visible ownership for the improvements we’ve made and will continue to make.

For More Information

MariaDB Enterprise Server 10.5 provides many enhancements and additional features that increase versatility and scalability. Adding distributed SQL, making ColumnStore even easier to use, and the significant improvements to the InnoDB storage engine, as well as the many other enhancements enables MariaDB Enterprise Server 10.5 to offer more solutions than ever before.