I had the honor of leading a session on Saturday, during the MariaDB Developers Meeting in Amsterdam, brainstorming around MariaDB Server 10.3. It’s definitely time to do that since MariaDB Server 10.2 has entered beta stage. In case you have missed that, I’ve wrapped up what’s included in 10.2 so far in a blog post on my employer’s site. In addition to the features mentioned in that blog post there are a couple of features still coming in 10.2 of which the most notable is that the MyRocks engine will be included. More about this later in another article.

In this article I will go through the first part of the features that were discussed for MariaDB Server 10.3. There will be a second part with more thoughts on other features coming in a couple of days.

During Google Summer of Code 2016 a few nice features were created that are now being polished to make their way into MariaDB Server 10.3. These are:

New Data Types such as data types for IPv6 and UUID have long been top voted wishes for MariaDB. Now it looks like one step ahead has been made with the implementation of a Pluggable Data Type API. It still exists in a separate branch, but it is now planned for inclusion in MariaDB Server 10.3. On top of the API the idea is to build User Defined Types according to the SQL Standard.

Another very much wished for group of features is to provide better support for CJK (Chinese, Japanese, and Korean) languages. The idea is to include the ngram full-text parser and MeCab full-text parser plugins. Also the GB 18030 standard for Chinese charsets is on the radar for 10.3.

On the storage engine side MyRocks will be included in 10.2, which will open MyRocks to a wider audience. It’s obvious that it will need work during 10.3 timeframe to grow in maturity. Another interesting storage engine discussed during the last few years is Spider, an engine that provides a sharding solution for databases. Although Spider already exists in MariaDB Server, there is a set of patches that needs to be incorporated on the server side to improve functionality and performance. These patches can be found in MDEV-7698.

The most popular storage engine, InnoDB, was also discussed during the meetup, including thoughts on interesting InnoDB features for 10.3. Most features from InnoDB in MySQL 5.7 will be available in MariaDB Server 10.2, but native partitioning will not. Native InnoDB partitioning was discussed, but since partitioning is done at the server level in MariaDB the thinking is that partitioning inside InnoDB will only be included if there is a clear advantage to using it over the server provided partitioning.

In MySQL 8.0 there are a couple of interesting new features for InnoDB that are interesting for MariaDB as well: InnoDB deadlock detect and the new information schema table. The timelines of 10.3 and 8.0 will partially determine whether these will be in 10.3. There are also a couple of very interesting contributions that will be evaluated for inclusion in MariaDB 10.3: “Lock wait policy” and “Persistent autoincrement”.

It seems likely that there will be contributions made from MariaDB Corporation in the area of database compatibility. Including things like missing SQL standard functionality and functionality provided by other database servers. In 10.2 there have been features added in this area like enforced check constraints, improved DEFAULT values and support for multiple triggers per table. Some features that fall into this category, which are targeted for 10.3 are:

Support for SEQUENCE

Addition of a PL/SQL parser

Support for INTERSECT

Support for EXCEPT

I’ll end this first part of the thoughts from the 10.3 feature session here and come back with the second part in a couple of days.

We’re very interested in hearing your feedback on this! It’s definitely not too late to let us know what you think is important for 10.3. You can comment directly on this blog post or you can share your input on the maria-discuss mailing list. Another way of reaching the developers and others around MariaDB is to reach out on Freenode IRC on channel #maria. If you have input on a specific feature you can also comment on the feature directly in MariaDB’s JIRA.