Bringing Oracle’s Associative Arrays to MariaDB

One of the standout features of Oracle PL/SQL is the associative array — a versatile and efficient in-memory data structure that developers rely on for fast temporary lookups, streamlined batch processing, and dynamic report generation.

With the MariaDB 12.1 preview release, we’re excited to announce that associative arrays have landed in MariaDB as part of our growing set of Oracle compatibility features. This milestone, tracked under MDEV-34319, brings Oracle-style associative arrays into the MariaDB procedural language — complete with native type declarations, variable construction, and method support.

Let’s explore what’s included, what’s different, and how this feature was implemented from the ground up. 

Looking for more migration guinea pigs

Remember our open letter, Looking for MySQL 5.7 or 8.0 guinea pigs?

We caught a nice German guinea pig!

We caught a nice guinea pig, a German one, from Hannover. They are currently using MySQL 5.7 (as was our prime wish), and they will be doing a live migration to MariaDB 10.11. They have 1.000.000.000 queries a day, their database size is 412 GB, and our goal is to the migration of the production data in less than five minutes – during our MariaDB Migration Workshop at our pre-FOSDEM event on Friday 2 Feb 2024.