MariaDB 10.5 (LTS): What's New, Release History & Support Lifecycle

What Is New in MariaDB 10.5

MariaDB 10.5 is a long-term support (LTS) release that brings significant improvements in reliability, modern SQL features, security, and performance. It introduces new data types, storage engines, atomic DDL behavior in many cases, and better observability while cleaning up older internals.

This version marks an important step toward better branding with binary name changes and lays groundwork for future enhancements in replication and JSON handling.

Major New Features

Binary and Branding Changes

MariaDB 10.5 renames client and utility binaries from the mysql* prefix to mariadb* (for example, mariadb, mariadb-dump, mariadb-import). Symlinks to the old names are provided for backward compatibility.

Security and Privilege Improvements

The SUPER privilege is split into more granular privileges for better security control:

• New privileges such as BINLOG MONITOR, REPLICATION MASTER ADMIN, and REPLICATION SLAVE ADMIN.
• Many replication-related commands now require specific privileges instead of full SUPER.

Replication Enhancements

Replication receives several useful updates:

• Full GTID support in Galera Cluster with shared GTID across all nodes.
• New binlog_row_metadata variable to control how much metadata is logged in the binary log (FULL, MINIMAL, or NO_LOG).
• Extended binary log metadata including column names, signedness, character sets, and primary key information.
• slave_parallel_mode defaults to optimistic.
• REPLICA is now a synonym for SLAVE in replication statements.

Performance and Optimizer Improvements

MariaDB 10.5 includes many internal optimizations:

• Up to 25% faster connection handling.
• Improved range optimizer and better choice between ref and range access.
• Faster crc32() function on modern architectures (AMD64, ARMv8, POWER8).
• Optimized sort buffer usage to reduce temporary files for large VARCHAR, CHAR, or BLOB columns.
• Deferred change buffer merges and improved redo log group commit in InnoDB.

InnoDB Changes

Important default and internal changes in InnoDB include:

• New default: innodb_adaptive_hash_index = OFF and innodb_checksum_algorithm = full_crc32.
• Many old InnoDB variables and tables removed or deprecated (for example, innodb_buffer_pool_instances, multiple buffer pool instances concept).
• Optimized page header access and redo log record format.

Other Notable Changes

Additional improvements include:

• New Information Schema tables for thread pool monitoring (THREAD_POOL_GROUPS, THREAD_POOL_QUEUES, etc.).
• Migration from PCRE to PCRE2 for regular expressions.
• Support for WITHOUT OVERLAPS in application period tables.
• IF EXISTS support for ALTER TABLE and RENAME TABLE.
• Performance Schema updated to include many features from MySQL 5.7.
• Reduced binary tarball size.