MariaDB Interesting look at what's new in MariaDB 10.4

eva2000 · Jun 5, 2019

Interesting look into what's new with MariaDB 10.4 branch which is currently in development. Seems there's more drastic changes than I first thought and seems to be a split away from upstream Oracle MySQL in terms of InnoDB future features https://severalnines.com/blog/whats-new-mariadb-104

MariaDB 10.4 is a current development branch of MariaDB. Recently, on the 21st of May, the third Release Candidate (10.4.5) was released, bringing us closer to the official release. That’s why we thought it might be a good idea to take a look at the new 10.4 features. We will also share some thoughts on a recent blog post published by MariaDB Corporation. For information about the release itself, you can find all the details in the changelog of MariaDB 10.4.0.
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Big change is where MySQL user management data is stored

General changes

One of the biggest changes are changes in the user management. Mysql.host table will not be created, mysql.user table is deprecated. User accounts and global privileges will be kept in the mysql.global_priv table. This is potentially a serious change for all the tools (including ClusterControl), which have an option to manage MySQL and MariaDB users - new cases will have to be written to cover user management in MariaDB 10.4 and onwards. While we acknowledge that changes are needed, this definitely does not help to maintain tools for both MariaDB and MySQL, making the tooling landscape even more divided than it already is.
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MariaDB 10.4 will no longer merge InnoDB features from Oracle MySQL upstream.

Quite recently we saw a blog post explaining MariaDB stance on InnoDB changes and compatibility. The gist is that MariaDB will no longer merge InnoDB features from MySQL, the focus will be on the stability and performance improvement done by MariaDB. This basically means that MariaDB will become incompatible with MySQL. Even if you could do the binary upgrade in the past, this will not be possible in the future. Even right now it can be tricky to execute. This increases the importance of tools like mydumper/myloader as logical backup will be the only way for migration. What is good, MariaDB will be able to own the stability of their fork of InnoDB - they will not have to deal with issues introduced by upstream developers therefore we can expect less bugs being introduced.
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For us users, all of this means that MariaDB 10.4 should be more stable than the previous releases. It also means that eventually we will have to learn internals of two different storage engines - especially if we care about the performance. This is far from ideal but that’s the way it is. Tools will have to be designed to work with one or the other version of InnoDB (or additional work will have to be added to support both MySQL and MariaDB). We will keep an eye on how this will progress. When you think of it, it is not such a surprising move - MariaDB always had to take its time to integrate with more recent InnoDB version. With more and more incompatible features being added to MariaDB and huge changes introduced in MySQL 8.0, it makes sense to focus on developing new functionality rather than on porting incompatible InnoDB from upstream MySQL.
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Looks like for now MariaDB 10.3 is more suited if you want to or ever plan on switching between other MySQL versions like Oracle MySQL and/or Percona MySQL.

FYI, on Centmin Mod's very very and I mean very long term To Do List, is planned Oracle and Percona MySQL 5.7/8.0 support - see development dashboard at https://github.com/centminmod/centminmod/projects/1

eva2000 · Jun 21, 2019

Looks like MariaDB 10.4 is GA Stable now Now GA: MariaDB Community Server 10.4 | MariaDB though them moving away from being MySQL (Oracle) compatible and drastic changes in how user/password management is done in MariaDB 10.4 compared to early major versions is something to consider when looking at using MariaDB 10.4. As such Centmin Mod 123.09beta01 will still default to MariaDB 10.3 for now and still privately testing MariaDB 10.4 to see how these changes affect long term running of MariaDB MySQL server.

Security

One of the biggest changes has been made in user management. User accounts are now stored in a new table, mysql.global_priv, which allows a more flexible privilege definition. Compatibility for administration tools is provided via a view to virtually provide the old table mysql.user. The unix_socket authentication plugin is now the default on Unix-like systems, and local root users are verified via their system user accounts.

To support best practice regarding account management, accounts can be locked with MariaDB Server 10.4, and password expiry can be enabled.

Services that require changing SSL certificates no longer need to restart MariaDB Server to use new certificates. A FLUSH SSL reloads them.
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eva2000 · Jun 21, 2019

MariaDB 10.1 to 10.2 to 10.3 to 10.4 upgrade guides - ensure you backup databases first !

MariaDB - MariaDB 10.1 upgrades to MariaDB 10.2, 10.3 and 10.4.

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