After a year of development and six preliminary versions, the new stable version of the new branch of the DBMS MariaDB 10.4 has already been released., within which a branch of MySQL is developed, which maintains compatibility with previous versions and offers integration of additional storage engines and advanced functions.
MariaDB development is overseen by the independent MariaDB Foundation according to a completely open and transparent development process, independent of individual vendors.
MariaDB comes in place of MySQL in many Linux distributions (RHEL, SUSE, Fedora, openSUSE, Slackware, OpenMandriva, ROSA, Arch Linux, Debian) and is implemented in such important projects as Wikipedia, Google Cloud SQL and Nimbuzz.
Main new features of MariaDB 10.4
One of the main features of this version of MariaDB is that contara with a 5-year support, so this version will be supported until June 2024.
Transitioned to using the C ++ 11 standard (Atomic operations are involved) and the performance of the "Collation" locale properties for Unicode has been significantly increased, allowing you to set classification rules and comparison methods, taking into account the meaning of the characters.
The structure includes Galera 4 synchronous multiple master replication technology, which enables the active-active multiple master topology to be applied, allowing reading and writing to any node.
In synchronous replication, all nodes always contain real data, that is, it guaranteed the absence of lost transactions, since the transaction is recorded only after the data is distributed to all nodes.
Replication is done in parallel mode, at the row level, with only information about the transmitted changes.
On Unix-like systems, the unix_socket authentication plugin is enabled by default, allowing you to use the accounts on the system to connect to the DBMS using a local Unix socket.
We can also find that added ability to assign user password lifespan, after which the password is marked as expired.
To establish the validity term of the password in the operations «CREATE USER» and «ALTER USER» to it we have to add the term «PASSWORD EXPIRE INTERVAL N DAY».
On the other hand support will be found to block users from DBMS using the expression "ACCOUNT LOCK" in the "CREATE USER" and "ALTER USER" operations.
Also the execution of privilege checks was significantly sped up in configurations with a large number of users or access rules.
Discontinued use of mysql.user and mysql.host tables. The mysql.global_priv table is now used to store user accounts and global privileges.
Support for systemic versioned tables, in which not only is the current data segment stored, but information about all changes made previously is kept, sIt is expanded by time-lapse operations.
Added new command "FLUSH SSL" to reload SSL certificates without restarting the server;
In the operations "INSTALL PLUGIN", "UNINSTALL PLUGIN" and "UNINSTALL SONAME" added support for the expressions "IF NOT EXISTS" and "IF EXISTS".
Shock resistant system boards are proposed for the storage of which the Aria engine is used.
Finally we can also highlight that the ability to use more than one authentication plugin for each account was added.
Other changes that can be found in this version are:
- Authentication plugin added support expression "SET PASSWORD"
- Added plugin to define your own field types
- Added support for UDF window functions (User Defined Functions)
- In the «FLUSH TABLES» operation the «BACKUP LOCK» mode is implemented, which can be used during the backup of the database files
- Added support for server commands starting with the name mariadb, alternative to commands starting with "mysql" (for example, mariadump instead of mysqldump).