MariaDB 11.4.0 preview release now available

The MariaDB Foundation is pleased to announce the availability of  MariaDB 11.4.0, a preview release in the MariaDB 11.4 series. MariaDB 11.4 is a short-term release and will be maintained for one year after its G.A (stable) release.

The release contains the following new features. Note that as a preview release, not all features are guaranteed to make it into the MariaDB 11.4 series.

Partitioning

• ALTER TABLE … EXCHANGE PARTITION and  ALTER TABLE … CONVERT TABLE … TO now support the WITH VALIDATION and WITHOUT VALIDATION clauses. If neither is specified, the default behavior is WITH VALIDATION ( MDEV-22164)

Sys Schema

• New view  sys.privileges_by_table_by_level shows granted privileges broken down by table on which they allow access and level on which they were granted. For example, if a user x has SELECT privilege granted ON db.*, this view will list all tables in the db schema with the user x having SELECT privilege on them. This is different from  INFORMATION_SCHEMA.TABLE_PRIVILEGES, which only lists privileges granted on the table level ( MDEV-24486)

Optimizer

• Not only ascending, but also  descending indexes can now be used to optimize  MIN() and  MAX() ( MDEV-27576)

Spider

• The preferred way to specify  Spider parameters is to use the dedicated Spider table options (implemented in  MariaDB 11.3). Abusing the table COMMENT clause is now deprecated ( MDEV-28861)

Miscellaneous

• CONV() function now supports conversion up to base 62 ( MDEV-30879)

Replication

• Binary log writing speed was improved by moving checksum calculations out of the global binlog mutex ( MDEV-31273). This is a contribution by Kristian Nielsen
• New system variable  max_binlog_total_size enables binary log purging when the total size of all binary logs exceeds the specified threshold. The implementation is based on the patch from Percona ( MDEV-31404)
• New system variable  slave_connections_needed_for_purge disables binary log purging until the number of connected slaves reaches the specified threshold ( MDEV-31404).
• FULL_NODUP is a new value for the  binlog_row_image system variable. It essentially works like FULL, that is all columns are included in the event, but it takes less space, because the after image omits columns that were not changed by the UPDATE statement, and have same values as in the before image. This is a contribution from Alibaba ( MDEV-32589)
• mariadb-binlog –flashback support for the  FULL_NODUP mode. This is a contribution from Alibaba ( MDEV-32894).
• MariaDB can optionally maintain a special index of  GTIDs and their location in the binary log. If enabled, it allows finding very quickly where a new connecting replica should start replicating from. Without an index this required scanning the binlog. This is a contribution by Kristian Nielsen ( MDEV-4991).
• GTID events in the  binary log now include connection id of the client connection that generated the event. This allows  mariadb-binlog to tag all row events with a corresponding connection id ( MDEV-7850).

Data Types

• The  TIMESTAMP range of values was extended. The maximal allowed value for timestamps was ‘2038-01-19 03:14:07 UTC’, and is now ‘2106-02-07 06:28:15 UTC’. This does not change the storage format, and new tables can be read by old MariaDB servers as long as timestamp values are within the old timestamp range. At the moment this is only supported on 64-bit platforms, excluding Windows (the actual requirement is sizeof(long)==8) ( MDEV-32188).

MariaDB 11.4.0 preview release now available - MariaDB.org