MariaDB 12.0, the latest stable release of the popular open-source database, is now available—packed with critical bug fixes, optimizations, and expanded platform support. Keep in mind that 12.0 is a rolling release version—anyone wanting to stay on the cutting edge should plan to jump to MariaDB 12.1.2 once it arrives.
Much of the work in this update centers on storage engines—especially InnoDB and Aria. For instance, MariaDB tackled corruption issues involving the adaptive hash index, problems shrinking the buffer pool, and potential server hangs tied to specific memory scenarios.
There’s also a new innodb_linux_aio parameter, which smartly switches between io_uring and the legacy libaio interfaces depending on the Linux environment.
The Aria engine, too, sees a handful of important bug fixes. Issues when adding foreign keys to tables using vector indexes have been resolved, further improving overall stability for workloads relying on this engine.
On the table definition front, MariaDB 12.0 corrects a nasty edge case where adding a UNIQUE constraint with USING HASH could corrupt tables with foreign keys. For anyone making heavy use of partitioned tables, there’s now a fix for replica crashes following partition-to-table conversions.
Cluster users get an upgrade to Galera 26.4.23, bringing improved compatibility with OpenZFS 2.3.0 and up. MariaDB 12.0 also addresses long-standing replication hiccups, like the master node becoming unresponsive when a replica is stopped in semi-synchronous replication.
Plus, for those relying on mariabackup, the backup process now handles tricky Aria table cases and avoids certain replication mismatches, closing several bug reports from the community.
Database power users will spot plenty of optimizer and SQL-level fixes—these range from handling derived tables with unnamed columns to more accurate index merge plans. The release also squashes an annoying bug that could lead to endless loops and memory leaks during table analysis if UTF-8 characters were involved.
Lastly, MariaDB 12.0 expands its support for a slew of major Linux distros and architectures. Packages are now available for Fedora 42, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 (including x86_64, aarch64, ppc64le, and s390x), SLES 15 SP6 and SP7, Ubuntu 25.04 (Plucky Puffin), and Debian 13 (Trixie).
It’s also worth noting this is the final release for Ubuntu 24.10, which reached the end of standard support in July 2025. And for anyone running CentOS Stream 9, a previously missing MariaDB-provider-lzo package is now properly included.
For the full breakdown, see the announcement.
