MariaDB 11.8 LTS Released

Written by Written by Kaj Arnö Leave a comment on MariaDB 11.8 LTS Released
MariaDB 11.8 GA LTS

Now is a good time to upgrade to the freshest MariaDB Server. MariaDB 11.8 is the yearly long term support release for 2025. It’s the first LTS with support for MariaDB Vector, and it includes a number of other updates based on user requests. You can seamlessly upgrade to MariaDB 11.8 from MariaDB 11.4 (the previous LTS) or any older release, back to MariaDB Server 10.0 or earlier, including most versions of MySQL Server.

MariaDB 11.8 LTS includes everything added since 11.4, incorporating changes from 11.5, 11.6, 11.7, as well as new features not released before. Here is a more technical summary of what’s new (for even more details, check out Changes and Improvements in MariaDB 11.8).

MariaDB Vector: AI arrives in LTS

This is undoubtedly the most significant highlight of MariaDB 11.8 LTS: full support for MariaDB Vector. We have blogged about MariaDB Vector several times before, presented at conferences, and documented it thoroughly on our dedicated project page.

  • Native VECTOR data type, with performant indexing for nearest-neighbor search 
  • Functions for calculating vector similarity: VEC_DISTANCE_EUCLIDEAN(), VEC_DISTANCE_COSINE(), and VEC_DISTANCE() that conveniently selects one of he first two depending on the index type.
  • Functions for converting binary vectors to its textual representation and back VEC_FromText() and VEC_ToText().
  • SIMD hardware optimizations for Intel (AVX2 and AVX512), ARM and IBM Power10 CPUs.

Vector search capabilities are crucial for RAG and other modern AI and machine learning applications, enabling similarity search on large datasets. MariaDB Vector is now fully supported in LTS form, giving you stability and predictability for years to come. 

TIMESTAMP life range extended from 2038 to 2106

Like most open source projects, we have addressed the famous Year 2038 problem. But unlike many others, MariaDB achieves this without requiring any data conversion — provided you’re not using System-Versioned Tables. This means your existing data stays intact while you gain an 80-year reprieve on timestamp overflows.

Applications are global: Unicode as default character set

MariaDB previously defaulted to latin1 for character sets. Starting from 11.8, the default is utf8mb4 — modern Unicode with full emoji support 😉. This makes MariaDB fully compatible with today’s multilingual, global applications 💖. Collations have been updated to the UCA 14.0.0 version, offering improved consistency with current standards (MySQL is using UCA 9.0.0 which is similar in most cases).

State of the art authentication

Security matters. With the new authentication plugin, we have packaged state of the art authentication practices in one plugin, resolving legacy authentication issues found in previous releases. We called it PARSEC, Password Authentication with Response Signed by Elliptic Curves. While not yet the default, it represents the future of secure MariaDB authentication. 

In addition, Unix socket authentication has been improved based on user requests, simplifying local secure access.

Faster backup and restore

MariaDB Dump now supports parallel backup and restore via mariadb-dump and mariadb-import, a long-requested feature by DBAs. Parallelism greatly speeds up operations, whether you’re dumping a single large database or multiple databases simultaneously. This brings many of the benefits previously available only in external tools like MyDumper directly into mariadb-dump.

Improved replication performance

MariaDB 11.8 brings significant replication improvements, contributed by MariaDB and the community (including Alibaba):

  • Faster commits of very large transactions thanks to binlog segment switching — avoiding costly file copying at commit time (binlog_large_commit_threshold).
  • Asynchronous rollback during binlog crash recovery allows for faster restarts after failures.
  • Replication can now automatically abort transactions that block replication for too long (slave_replication_delay_abort_timeout), improving availability.
  • Several contributions, including from Alibaba, further optimize replication behavior.

Deep observability adds usability

System monitoring has been enhanced based on real-world user requests. More statistics columns have been added, making it easier for DBAs to analyze performance and diagnose issues. Observability improvements also include extended user metadata, which allows administrators to better track account states, such as locked users or impending password expirations.

Various other user-driven refinements

As always, MariaDB 11.8 includes several quality-of-life enhancements contributed by both the community and customers:

  • Support for returning ROW values from stored functions.
  • Expanded Oracle compatibility with improved sequence support.
  • System-versioned tables adjustments for better flexibility.
  • Convenience improvements to Galera SST operations, simplifying cluster bootstrap scenarios.
  • Additional protocol and connector refinements.

Upgrading made simple

As always, upgrading to MariaDB 11.8 is very straightforward. In most cases, upgrades complete in seconds. The only known potential complication involves System-Versioned Tables, due to changes in the internal timestamp representation — a feature loved by its current user base. For more details, please refer to the Changes and Improvements in MariaDB 11.8 page.

Call to Action: Time to upgrade

In short: MariaDB 11.8 LTS brings both long-requested enhancements and future-looking features like MariaDB Vector — all while remaining fully backward compatible for almost all users.

Talk to your team and plan your upgrade to MariaDB 11.8 LTS today!

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