MariaDB 11.7.0 preview release available

The MariaDB Foundation is pleased to announce the availability of MariaDB 11.7.0, a preview of the MariaDB 11.7 series. MariaDB 11.7 will be a rolling release.

MariaDB 11.7.0 introduces numerous new features, in particular

* Functions to generate UUID version 4 and version 7. A contribution by Stefano Petrilli.
* Near-instant binlogging of large transactions (avoid copying into the binary log). A contribution by Song Libing.
* Faster crash recovery where prepared transactions are rolled back asynchronously. A contribution by Song Libing.
* Cost-based choice between subquery optimization strategies in UPDATE and DELETE
* New GIS functions: ST_Validate(), MBRCoveredBy(), ST_Simplify(), ST_GeoHash(), ST_LatFromGeoHash(), ST_LongFromGeoHash(), ST_IsValid(), ST_Collect(). A Google Summer of Code 2024 project by Stefano Petrilli.
* System-versioned tables can be ALTERed from having implicit to explicit versioning columns without losing the history.
* Stored functions can return ROW values.
* Columns in derived tables can be explicitly named. This is particularly useful for table value constructors (VALUES() syntax).
* CREATE SERVER statement can accept arbitrary key/value pairs for engines that understand them. Namely, for Spider. SHOW CREATE SERVER was added to see how a server was created.
* SESSION_USER() is no longer an alias for USER(), but shows the account that created the session. Unlike CURRENT_USER it does not change inside stored routines.
* CURRENT_TIMESTAMP now actually returns a TIMESTAMP value, not a DATETIME. This fixes various anomalies around Daylight Saving Time changes.
* Many changes related to system variables — binlog_optimize_thread_scheduling, spider_table_crd_thread_count, and spider_table_sts_thread_count were deprecated, slave_abort_blocking_timeout and log_slow_always_query_time were added, max_sort_length causes a warning, when exceeded.