14 DAY TRIAL // MariaDB 10.0.5, aka the MariaDB 10.0 Beta, is out and available for testing or for deployment if you're feeling lucky. The MySQL fork is evolving fast, and the latest beta brings quite a few new features and many, many smaller improvements and fixes.
"My feeling is that people have in the past few months started to understand the value of MariaDB 10.0. There is a good group of people and companies that have been trying out and using the MariaDB 10.0 alpha releases and providing us with excellent feedback," MariaDB Foundation's Chair Rasmus Johansson writes.
"MariaDB 10.0 is a massive release with loads of new features which ease several pain points that MariaDB and MySQL users have run into over the years," he adds.
The latest beta comes with plenty of new things; so many, that they're grouped in categories. On the replication front, MariaDB is introducing the Global Transaction Id, which makes it possible to keep track of a certain operation across a series of master and slave servers.
Another addition is multi-source replication which, as the name suggests, makes it possible to replicate data from multiple masters to one slave. Finally, Google contributed the parallel slave feature so that heavy workloads on a master server don't affect slaves as much.
One other area that is seeing improvements is storage engines. MariaDB 10.0 Beta adds support for the Cassandra Storage Engine, Connect Storage Engine, Sequence Storage Engine, Spider Storage Engine, and TokuDB.
MariaDB 10.0.5 also comes with several optimizations, quite a few admin improvements, and plenty of other new features, all listed in the blog post announcement.
MariaDB 10.0 is based on MySQL 5.5, but the team has been merging some of the MySQL 5.6 features that they believe are worthwhile, like support for InnoDB.