MariaDB is a popular database server made by the original authors of MySQL. It is a community-developed fork of MySQL and is one of the most widely used open-source relational database management systems (RDBMS). MariaDB is highly compatible with MySQL and allows users to effortlessly migrate databases from MySQL to MariaDB.
Related: The 5 Best Free Replacements for MySQL Server
A few days ago, the MariaDB Foundation announced the availability of MariaDB 10.7, the latest stable release in the MariaDB 10.x series.
MariaDB 10.7 Highlights
Looking at this new release, the biggest new feature is the newly added UUID data type. It is intended for the storage of 128-bit UUID (Universally Unique Identifier) data. Data retrieved by this data type is in the string representation defined in RFC4122.
MariaDB 10.7 also comes with two newly added functions for working with JSON data. The first one is JSON_EQUALS which checks if there is equality between two JSON objects. The second is JSON_NORMALIZE which can recursively sort keys and removes spaces, allowing comparison of JSON documents for equality.
On top of that, the new SFORMAT function can take an input string and a formatting specification and returns the string formatted using the rules the user passed in the specification.
As you probably know the various MariaDB storage engines, such as InnoDB, RocksDB, and Mroonga, can use different compression libraries. MariaDB 10.7 ships with five plugins that provides compression capabilities to the server and storage engines:
- bzip2
- lzma
- lz4lzo
- snappy
Last but not least, MariaDB Galera Cluster was updated to version 26.4.11. For those of you unaware, Galera is a true multi-master replication cluster based on synchronous replication which adds high availability to your database by distributing changes to different servers.
The stable version of MariaDB 10.7 will have a short-term support cycle and it will be supported until February 2023.
If you’re doing an upgrade from another version like 10.6 check the official upgrade guide and take note of the differences between the two versions of MariaDB. This is important for production use cases where custom variables have been used to tune the database and ensure efficiency in transactions.
For more information, you can refer to the official announcement post.
