Tag Archives: MariaDB Releases

Posts about releases of MariaDB.

Explanation on MariaDB 10.0

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In end of May I told about the numbering plans for the next version of MariaDB in the blog post What comes in between MariaDB now and MySQL 5.6?. We received quite a lot of feedback and criticism on the idea of calling the next version MariaDB 10.0. Here is a little more information about why it makes sense to call the next version 10.0.

This is not news for most of you. MariaDB is not just a set of patches applied on top of MySQL. MariaDB includes features which are similar to the corresponding features in MySQL, but the implementations differ, like for example the thread pool, microsecond support and query annotations in RBR binlog. MariaDB also includes a lot of features that are not in MySQL. For a complete listing of feature differences check out http://kb.askmonty.org/en/mariadb-versus-mysql-features/.

To call the next MariaDB version MariaDB 5.6 would be misleading.

Eventually there will be a version of MariaDB which includes all the features of MySQL 5.6 either ported or implemented in a different way, but before that there will be at least a couple of releases which include some features which have been ported from MySQL 5.6 and some completely new features that aren’t in MySQL 5.6.

A concern we have received is that tools and other clients validating the server version they are connecting to might become incompatible with MariaDB without changes in the tool/client. Thank you Peter Laursen from Webyog for your input on this! The issue is that tools and other clients rely on the return statement of “SELECT VERSION();”. Based on what version number is returned the tool enables / disables features. The fact is that no version numbering can solve it. Even if we would call our next release 5.6.1, it would not have all the features of MySQL 5.6.1, only some of them. It would also have some of the features of later MySQL releases, and features that are not in MySQL at all. In other words no single MySQL version number can adequately describe the feature set  of MariaDB. Thus we think it will be less confusing and less ambiguous to use a completely different number, a distinct version series.

We suggest that “SELECT VERSION();” return the correct version, e.g. 10.0.1-MariaDB.

In addition to the reasoning above current MariaDB releases already introduce additional functionality for tools — like more statistics and extra switches — compared to MySQL. This added functionality is highly beneficial for tools to take advantage of. We highly recommend tool vendors to separate between MySQL and MariaDB in this regard today, and doing so will only become more important going forward. We are also thinking about introducing a way for DBAs to impact what the VERSION() string says.

One area that seems to rule out all fancier version numbering, like 5.5-10.0, is the distribution packages, which in general support only normal versioning of type major.minor[.build[.revision]]. Even if a specific package format would support some more complex version number scheme the upgrade determination becomes hard if the introduced new version number is not only incremented numbers.

I hope this explains the logic behind choosing 10 to be the version number of the next MariaDB version. Your feedback on this is still however still more than welcome.

What comes in between MariaDB now and MySQL 5.6?

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We’re quite happy that we’ve released four major releases that are production ready (better known as generally available or GA in the MySQL world) in the last 26 months. That is just a little over two years, and a whole lot of features. In that same time, MySQL has seen one GA release (MySQL 5.5) and we’re all eagerly awaiting the upcoming MySQL 5.6.

You’ll note that we built MariaDB 5.1, 5.2, and 5.3 based on the MySQL 5.1 codebase. A significant number of features went into MariaDB 5.3 (our biggest GA release to date), with the biggest changes in the optimizer in over a decade. There were also many replication based changes included like the now famous group commit for the binary log. Our Knowledgebase has a summary of MariaDB 5.3 features.

Work on MariaDB 5.3 started long before MySQL 5.5 went GA. It was a huge task to move all these 5.3 features into MariaDB 5.5 and at the same time merge MariaDB 5.5 with MySQL 5.5. It caused a significant delay in us getting a release of MariaDB 5.5 out there as production ready software. By now it must be clear that we included all changes in MariaDB 5.5 from 5.3, 5.2, and 5.1. We spent the time developing new features and keeping it current against current versions of MySQL.

We released MariaDB 5.5 in April and we have always aimed for short release cycles where possible to keep up with rapidly changing distributions. With this in mind many have been thinking about the release cycle from now onwards.

What will the next release of MariaDB, which we are working on, be called? We want to release our new features in a GA version soon and not wait for MySQL 5.6 to reach GA quality. But if we release a GA version before MySQL 5.6 is GA, it will be very confusing to call our release 5.6. In addition, this time there are no free version numbers between 5.5 and 5.6 like there were between 5.1 and 5.5 when we could use 5.2 and 5.3.

We are thinking of calling it MariaDB 10.0. It will include stable GA-ready features from MySQL 5.6 (these will be backported), as well as encompass some of our plans for the next release. It will be based on the MySQL 5.5 codebase. Then we plan to release MariaDB 10.1, MariaDB 10.2 and so on.

What happens when MySQL 5.6 is GA-ready? We’ll release a MariaDB version 11.0. It will include all the features of MariaDB 10, and encompass the features from the MySQL 5.6 codebase (that weren’t already backported into MariaDB in a previous release).

Does this mean we are veering away from being a backward compatible branch to MySQL? Of course not. We will be feature complete. We’re just in the lull of time between MySQL releases, in a similar fashion to what we did for MariaDB 5.2 and MariaDB 5.3. Astute followers will note that there is no MySQL 5.2 and 5.3.

Essentially this is just a change in the numbering scheme. A change which allows us to release more often than MySQL does. You are invited to contribute to the conversation on the maria-discuss mailing list.

MariaDB at the MySQL Conference & Expo 2012

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On Friday last week, after the intensive days of the conference, Ars Technica wrote and published a nice article about MariaDB including many of the messages we had been delivering during the conference, http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2012/04/mysql-founders-latest-mariadb-release-takes-enterprise-features-open-source.ars.

MariaDB seals
MariaDB seals

Last year, when it became clear that O’Reilly wasn’t going to arrange the MySQL user conference in the future, there was a lot of discussion on who should arrange it. In the end Percona was pretty fast informing everyone that they had booked the convention center in Santa Clara to arrange the conference this year. Now with the results to hand it’s easy to say that the conference was very well arranged. Great work Percona!

The MariaDB booth was located in the .Org section of the expo hall and we experienced a huge crowd, especially on the first day (Wednesday) of the conference. Our t-shirts were really popular and we could probably have handed out even double the amount of what we had with us. Unfortunately for those in attendance, we had to put some aside for our next upcoming event in Bellingham, WA, USA 28-29th of April. It’s the LinuxFest Northwest 2012, http://linuxfestnorthwest.org. We hope to see some of you there!

We released MariaDB 5.5.23 GA on Tuesday of the conference. Apparently people just loved this news and we’ve enjoyed double our usual download rates since then.

On the SkySQL MariaDB Solutions Day on Friday the 13th, the MySQL founders Monty and David started the day with a panel and the day continued with sessions on all kinds of MariaDB and MySQL related topics. Make sure you read SkySQL’s summary, http://www.skysql.com/blogs/jenwilbur/seal-you-next-year-successful-mysql-friday-13th-santa-clara.
SkySQL has also posted pictures of the event on https://www.facebook.com/skysql.

Happy panelist Monty
Happy panelist Monty

During the conference we had many interesting conversations with people and businesses that we haven’t had a chance to meet before who had migrated to MariaDB. I’m certain there will be even more of these discussions this year and next.

To stay up to date with MariaDB, add yourself to the MariaDB announce list, which informs mainly about new releases. Also add yourself to the MariaDB Facebook page to get even more MariaDB news. Sign up at http://mariadb.org.