MariaDB has now reached the 10th major release since the original authors of MySQL started taking the code base in another direction than where MySQL is going under Oracle’s ownership. Today MariaDB has many more features than Oracle MySQL and it is the default MySQL variant in Debian. This presentation covers what new features landed in MariaDB 10.5 and also touches on how the long existing features have evolved to today, and naturally what is their state and best practices for Debian users. MariaDB has also built-in support for Galera master-master replication and Galera 4 has recently landed in Debian, so it will also be covered.

1. MariaDB 10.5
and Galera 4
State of MariaDB in Debian
and
What is new?
Thr 27th August 2020 23:00 UTC
Follow
@ottokekalainen
to
get
link
to
slides!

2. MariaDB 10.5 and Galera 4
State of MariaDB in Debian
and
What is new?
Thr 27th August 2020 23:00 UTC
Follow
for
news
@ottokekalainen

3. MariaDB
A variant of MySQL by the
original authors of MySQL
Forked in 2008
when Oracle
acquired MySQL
MariaDB 5.5 full drop-in
replacement for MySQL 5.5
MariaDB 10.5 backwards
compatible with all
previous versions of
MariaDB and MySQL
Divergence increases for
each new MySQL version

4. Galera Cluster
multi-master cluster based
on synchronous replication
for InnoDB tables
By Codership Oy
Available for MariaDB,
MySQL and also used in
Percona XtraDB Cluster
Included by default since
MariaDB Server 10.1
MariaDB/MySQL clients can
read and write to any
node, all nodes are equal

5. State of MariaDB and Galera in Debian

6. MariaDB and MySQL timeline
MariaDB 5.1
MariaDB 5.5
shipped in Debian 8 MariaDB 10.0
shipped in Debian 9 MariaDB 10.1
MariaDB 10.2
shipped in Debian 10 MariaDB 10.3
MariaDB 10.4
ships in Debian 11 MariaDB 10.5
MySQL 5.1 shipped in Debian 6
MySQL 5.5 shipped in Debian 7 and 8
MySQL 5.6
MySQL 5.7
MySQL 8.0
GA
2008
2009
2010
2011
2012
2013
2014
2015
2016
2017
2018
2019
2020

7. State of MariaDB and MySQL in Debian
● MariaDB 10.3 in Buster (latest Debian stable release)
● MariaDB 10.5 currently in NEW queue, will be in Bullseye
● Galera 3 in Buster; Galera 4 already in Bullseye and also
in Buster backports and Stretch backports
● No MySQL in stable Debian releases since Jessie
○ Exists in Debian unstable but will not migrate to testing and stable
○ Debian unstable had MySQL 5.7 for some years, MySQL 8.0 this month
● mysql-defaults define the settings
○ Debian defaults to MariaDB as decided by the Debian release team
○ Ubuntu defaults to Oracle MySQL as decided by Canonical

8. State of MariaDB and MySQL in Debian
● Maintainer dashboard
○ https://udd.debian.org/dmd/?pkg-mysql-maint%40lists.alioth.debian.org
● Packages overview
○ https://qa.debian.org/developer.php?email=pkg-mysql-maint%40lists.alioth.debian.org
● Selected tracker pages:
○ https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/mariadb-10.3
○ https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/mariadb-10.5
○ https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/galera-4

9. Packages overview for Debian MySQL Maintainers
<pkg-mysql-maint@lists.alioth.debian.org>

10. Old MariaDB versions in maintenance
https://packages.debian.org/search?lang=en&suite=all&searc
hon=names&keywords=mariadb-server
https://packages.ubuntu.com/search?lang=en&suite=all&sear
chon=names&keywords=mariadb-server

11. Plenty of work in both
developing new and maintaining old
Contributors welcome!

12. Commit summary 2018–2020
git summary debian/1%10.1.34-1..HEAD
commits : 386
authors :
349 Otto Kekäläinen 90.4%
7 Andreas Beckmann 1.8%
6 Faustin Lammler 1.6%
5 Samuel Thibault 1.3%
4 Vicențiu Ciorbaru 1.0%
3 Christian Göttsche 0.8%
2 James Clarke 0.5%
2 Julien Muchembled 0.5%
1 Adrian Bunk 0.3%
1 Bastian Germann 0.3%
1 Christian Ehrhardt 0.3%
1 Gregor Riepl 0.3%
1 Helge Deller 0.3%
1 Helmut Grohne 0.3%
1 Olaf 0.3%
1 Scott Kitterman 0.3%
git summary
mysql-5.7/debian/5.7.23-1..HEAD
commits : 175
authors :
104 Lars Tangvald 59.4%
56 Robie Basak 32.0%
6 Marc Deslauriers 3.4%
2 Andreas Hasenack 1.1%
1 Dimitri John Ledkov 0.6%
1 Karl Stenerud 0.6%
1 Matthias Klose 0.6%
1 Rafael David Tinoco 0.6%
1 Sergio Durigan Junior 0.6%
1 Steve Langasek 0.6%
1 William Grant 0.6%

13. Please join!
You don’t have to be a
coder/developer to help,
there are plenty of other
valued skills as well!
● Participate in
bugs.debian.org
discussions!
● Send merge requests on
Salsa:
https://wiki.debian.org/Teams/MySQL/patches
● Contribute upstream:
https://mariadb.org/get-involved/
● Join pkg-mysql-maint
mailing list
https://alioth-lists.debian.net/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo
/pkg-mysql-maint

14. Many aspects of
package
maintenance are
working very well
(e.g. Salsa-CI)
while other
aspects are in the
need of some
help..

15. 48%
Of messages on mailing
list in July were spam…
https://alioth-lists.debian.net/pipermail/pkg-mysql-maint/

16. Number of bugs stable and decreasing for MariaDB
MariaDB 10.4 entered
Debian experimental

17. Many bugs become stale because
they cannot be reproduced, are
vague, badly reported..
You can help out with these by
simply commenting on the bugs!
No coding skills required.

18. MariaDB vs MySQL compatibility?

19. Compatibility with MySQL?
Oracle does not care about MySQL–MariaDB compatibility, may
break in any new MySQL release at any time
MariaDB strives for backwards compatibility and
cross-compatibility with all previous versions of MariaDB
and MySQL
MySQL 5.7 → MariaDB 10.5 upgrades in-place
MySQL 8.0 → MariaDB 10.5 needs SQL dump + import

20. How it works in Debian
Running apt install mariadb-server always installs MariaDB
On new systems apt install mysql-server installs MariaDB
If running MySQL 5.5, 5.6, 5.7 the upgrade to MariaDB is
fully automatic with apt update / apt dist-upgrade
If system has MySQL 8.0, apt install mariadb-server will
install MariaDB, but the database will be empty: the local
admin needs to do a SQL dump + import (same applies if going
from MySQL 8.0 back to 5.7 or older)

21. What about app compatibility?
All the usual apps such as WordPress, Nextcloud etc work
fine with any MariaDB/MySQL version
In rare cases if an app uses special SQL syntax or features
only available in a specific version of MariaDB or MySQL,
then downgrading/crossgrading will be limited
Assume that over time MySQL and MariaDB will diverge more
and more

22. My recommendation: migrate to
MariaDB now when it is still easy
https://linuxnatives.net/2015/10-reasons-to-migrate-to-mariadb-if-still-using-mysql

23. MariaDB 10.5
What is new?

24. Diversion in practice:
new parallel mariadb-* commands
mariadb-access
mariadb-conv
mariadb-ldb
mariadb-slap
mariadb-admin
mariadb-convert-table-format
mariadb-optimize
mariadb-test
mariadb-analyze
mariadb-dump
mariadb-plugin
mariadb-test-embedded
mariadb-backup
mariadb-dumpslow
mariadb-repair
mariadb-tzinfo-to-sql
mariadb-binlog
mariadb-find-rows
mariadb-report
mariadb-upgrade
mariadb-check
mariadb-fix-extensions
mariadb-secure-installation
mariadb-waitpid
mariadb-client-test
mariadb-hotcopy
mariadb-service-convert
mariadb-client-test-embedded
mariadb-import
mariadb-setpermission
mariadb-config
mariadb-install-db
mariadb-show
mariadb
mariadbd
Old commands still work in parallel so you have time to update your scripts!

25. Service and process names: mariadb and mariadbd
$ systemctl start mariadb
$ service mariadb restart
$ ps faxu
/bin/sh /usr/bin/mysqld_safe
_ /usr/sbin/mariadbd --basedir=/usr --datadir=/var/lib/mysql
--plugin-dir=/usr/lib/mysql/plugin --user=mysql --skip-log-error
--pid-file=/run/mysqld/mysqld.pid --socket=/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock
_ logger -t mysqld -p daemon error
Systems that upgrade from MySQL will still have the mysql service name
available (as symlink to mariadb) so scripts/automation continue to work.

26. More naming changes
In MariaDB 10.5 the term REPLICA is a synonym for SLAVE in
SQL statements

27. MariaDB 10.5 performance improvements
Binary row logging is faster
Connect speed is faster (up to 25%)
New PCRE regex library version
New crc32 function
New performance_schema_* variables
Many small performance improvements
across the code base
ANALYZE improved for easier
visibility into query optimizer
InnoDB has been refactored and many
configuration variables have been
deprecated in favor of being
automatically correct as InnoDB
optimizes itself
Doublewrite buffer used less
InnoDB redo log format optimized to
be faster and to need fewer log
operations
https://mariadb.com/openworks/sessions-on-demand/faster-b
etter-stronger-the-new-innodb/

28. MariaDB 10.5 security improvements
Option require_secure_transport to
force encryption in transit
There are 8 new subsets to the
SUPER privileges for more
fine-grained access control
There have been a huge amount of
security features added since 10.0
that most sysadmins have not heard
about yet. Get studying! :)
The passwordless root user used in
Debian for security purposes since
2015 was fully adopted upstream in
the MariaDB 10.4 release
Hence the 10.5 packaging in
Debian.org will have much less
delta to upstream mariadb.org
Debian packaging

29. MariaDB 10.5 enhanced SQL
New DDL:
CREATE DATABASE ... COMMENT= ‘comment’
ALTER DATABASE ... COMMENT= ‘comment’
ALTER TABLE ... RENAME INDEX
ALTER TABLE ... RENAME COLUMN
ALTER TABLE IF EXISTS ...
RENAME TABLE IF EXISTS ...
Also new variable sql_if_exists
Support for INSERT ... RETURNING
and REPLACE ... RETURNING
statements
Temporal tables support
WITHOUT_OVERLAP and STARTS
RELEASE_ALL_LOCKS()
SHOW MASTER STATUS renamed to SHOW
BINLOG STATUS (old still works)

30. MariaDB 10.5 new JSON functions
JSON_ARRAYAGG()
Returns a JSON array containing an
element for each value in a given
set of JSON or SQL values. It acts
on a column or an expression that
evaluates to a single value.
JSON_OBJECTAGG()
Returns a JSON object containing
key-value pairs. It takes two
expressions that evaluate to a
single value, or two column names,
as arguments, the first used as a
key, and the second as a value.

31. MariaDB 10.5 new storage engines
mariadb-plugin-s3
The S3 storage engine allows one to
archive MariaDB tables in Amazon S3
(or any third-party public or
private cloud that implements S3
API), but still have them
accessible in MariaDB in read-only
mode.
New binary package soon in Debian
unstable!
mariadb-plugin-columnstore
MariaDB ColumnStore is a columnar
storage engine that utilizes a
massively parallel distributed data
architecture. It's a columnar
storage system built by porting
InfiniDB 4.6.7 to MariaDB, and
released under the GPL license.
Not in Debian.org yet as packaging
needs more quality assurance work.

32. MariaDB 10.5 removed storage engines
mariadb-plugin-tokudb
The storage engine based on fractal
indexes hasn’t been maintained much
at upstream since Percona acquired
Tokutek
Thus no new releases for a long
time and removed in MariaDB 10.5
mariadb-plugin-cassandra
Removed in upstream MariaDB 10.5
Was never in Debian.org repos

33. Galera 4
What is new?

34. MariaDB 10.5 and Galera
Full GTID support in MariaDB for
Galera (commit)
New variable wsrep_gtid_seq_no to
manually update the WSREP GTID
sequence number in the cluster
Upgrading a Galera cluster running
MariaDB 10.3 (in Debian stable) to
MariaDB 10.5 will involve upgrading
to new WSREP API version 26.
Rolling upgrades of live cluster
possible one host at a time.
Streaming replication enables
running transactions on unlimited
size
Group commit support
SST with lightweight locks to help
making backups
New metadata tables:
wsrep_cluster
wsrep_cluster_members
wsrep_streaming_log

35. MariaDB 10.5 and Galera 4
What is old?

36. A huge collection of software
Storage engines:
InnoDB
Aria
RocksDB
Mroonga
Spider
OQGraph
via Connect many more!
Integrated search with Sphinx
mariadb-backup
audit plugin, password rules
See also Debian packages:
libdbd-mariadb-perl
mariadb-connector-java
mariadb-connector-odbc
mariadb-mysql-kbs

37. Too much to cover in a single presentation :)

38. MariaDB Server Fest Online
Conference 14-20 Sep 2020
https://mariadb.org/fest2020/
Want to learn more?
● Run apt install
mariadb-server
● Read more at
mariadb.org and
mariadb.com
● Attend the upcoming
MariaDB event