Planning for default changes in MariaDB Server 10.2

Posted on May 18, 2016 by

MariaDB Server 10.2 has been a long time coming, as planning goes. We met in Amsterdam in October 2015 to start fleshing things out (and also managed a 10.1 GA then), and made a first alpha release in April 2016. If all goes well, 2016 will definitely see the GA release of MariaDB Server 10.2.

But this also means that it may be time to make changes in the server, and there is lively discussion on the maria-discuss/maria-developers mailing lists on some of these topics. In this post I’d like to bring your attention to removing reserved keywords, looking at syntax for aggregate stored functions as well as looking forward to default configuration changes in MariaDB Server 10.2.

One of the first discussions would be started by developer Alexander Barkov, as to why there are reserved keywords: UTC_TIME, UTC_DATE, UTC_DATETIME. The idea was to make them non-reserved keywords in MariaDB Server 10.2, and Peter Laursen and I started of with the idea that things remain compatible with MySQL, and maybe filing a bug to have them removed as reserved keywords there too. Sergei offered a good explanation as to why they were made reserved in the first place (i.e. a mistake), and in principle this made me OK with removing their reserved nature. Jean-François Gagné from Booking chimed in, suggesting that wider consensus would be a good idea — hence this post! Will Fong, support engineer at MariaDB Corporation cites this as a migration issue (and if this is the case, I’d like to see examples, so please feel free to drop a comment here). While Sergei believes this is a bikeshed colour issue, and the change won’t happen in MariaDB Server 10.2, I obviously think it deserves more attention.

For MariaDB Server 10.2 its also worth noting that if we’re focused on syntax, aggregate stored functions will require this decision soon, since its part of Google Summer of Code 2016.

And while we’re on planning MariaDB Server 10.2, Daniel Black has kicked off discussions on configuration changes to consider in MariaDB Server 10.2, with the attached Jira ticket, MDEV-7635 update defaults and simplify mysqld config parameters.

Looking forward to comments here, on the mailing lists, or even Jira tickets.