10.7 preview feature: Natural sort

Natural sort order is the ordering of strings in alphabetical order, while numbers are treated as numbers. This understanding of sorting is closer to human comprehension than to a machine. You can find an example of this feature in the Windows file manager. There the files are sorted in natural order. Try to create four folders “b1”, “a11”, “a2”, “a1”.

There are several programming languages which have natural sort. In PHP it is built-in function natsort, while as an third-party module in Python it is natsort, in Perl it is Sort::Naturally and in Matlab it is sort_nat.

10.7 preview feature: UUID Data Type

Universally unique identifiers (UUIDs) have a common place in computing already. A 128-bit value with a text representational value and the prescription of a number of version types to ensure a uniqueness makes it an ideal data type.

After many years of the UUID datatype existing only as a feature request in MDEV-4958, slowly accumulating votes and watchers, we are pleased to announce a preview of the UUID data type. Like the INET6 data type, this uses the datatype plugin API from MariaDB 10.5.

What does the UUID data type look like?

10.7.0 Comes As Preview Releases

Now is the time to try out the new candidate features of MariaDB Server 10.7, the next release series of MariaDB! This blog describes how the new preview releases work, and where we need your help as a MariaDB user.

The challenge: Making MariaDB mature quicker

Remember the challenges and visions I described two weeks ago? To address them we launch an experiment with several parallel preview releases of MariaDB Server 10.7 features.

This should solve two challenges mentioned in the blog: giving users early access to new functionality and making releases mature more rapidly through intensive internal testing.