maria-discuss team mailing list archive

[Daniel Bartholomew <dbart@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

The MariaDB project would like to announce the availability of MariaDB
5.3.3-rc, the latest addition to our growing lineup of supported
software. MariaDB 5.3.3-rc is the first Release Candidate release in
the 5.3 series. We hope to follow it up soon with a stable (GA)
5.3 release.


== MariaDB 5.3.3-rc Release Notes, Changelog, Downloads ===============

The release notes for MariaDB 5.3.3-rc are available from:
  http://kb.askmonty.org/en/mariadb-533-release-notes

A complete changelog for this beta is available from:
  http://kb.askmonty.org/en/mariadb-533-changelog 

Sources, binaries and packages can be downloaded from:
  http://downloads.askmonty.org/mariadb/5.3.3/ 

  Debian and Ubuntu packages (now including Ubuntu 11.10 "Oneiric")
  are available from our mirrored apt repositories. A sources.list
  generator can be found at:
    http://downloads.askmonty.org/mariadb/repositories/



== About MariaDB 5.3.3-rc =============================================

In MariaDB 5.3.3-rc there are a couple of changes compared to
previous 5.3 releases:


=== Performance:

Several optimizer features introduced in MariaDB 5.3 have been
thoroughly tested, and switched on by default in 5.3.3. These include:

* Subquery materialization (materialization=on)
  http://kb.askmonty.org/en/non-semi-join-subquery-optimizations

* Semi-join optimizations (semijoin=on,firstmatch=on,loosescan=on) 
  http://kb.askmonty.org/en/semi-join-subquery-optimizations
  
* Derived table optimization (derived_merge=on,derived_with_keys=on)
  (Documentation is being worked on)

* Index Condition Pushdown (index_condition_pushdown=on)
  http://kb.askmonty.org/en/index-condition-pushdown

* Nested loop join will use its Block-based variant more aggressively 
  http://kb.askmonty.org/en/block-based-join-algorithms
  
  * Block-based join for OUTER JOINs (outer_join_with_cache=on)

  * Block-based join for semi-joins (semijoin_with_cache=on)

  * Linked join buffers (more aggressive buffering of multi-way joins)
    (@@join_cache_level==2)

Also, DISTINCT and GROUP BY clauses are now removed from subqueries
when possible. This allows for more efficient query plans.
(backported from MySQL 5.6)


=== Usability:

EXPLAIN output has been improved in MariaDB 5.3.3 to be easier to
understand:

* The select_type column now shows MATERIALIZED for subqueries that
  are executed with Materialization (it used to show SUBQUERY, which
  made it hard to distinguish materialized subqueries from other
  kinds subqueries).

* For a Duplicate Elimination strategy, Start temporary is now shown
  at the first table from the subquery.
  
  See also: http://kb.askmonty.org/en/explain


=== GIS Operations:

GIS precise operations were added in MariaDB 5.3.3 (Documentation for
this is still being worked on).



== About MariaDB 5.3 ==================================================

The MariaDB 5.3 series introduces many new features, includes MariaDB
5.2, and is based on MariaDB 5.1 & MySQL 5.1. Some highlights of new
features in MariaDB 5.3 include:

- subquery optimizations that finally make subqueries usable
- many optimizer changes, including Classic Hash Join, Batched Key
  Access, a new implementation of Multi-Range-Read optimizations as
  well as Index Condition Pushdown
- NoSQL-style interfaces via the HandlerSocket plugin as well as
  dynamic columns
- group commit in XtraDB when the binary log is enabled
- Microsoft Windows performance improvements

These are just some of the highlights, and for a more complete list of
changes, please read the What is MariaDB 5.3 page:
  http://kb.askmonty.org/en/what-is-mariadb-53



== User Feedback plugin ===============================================

MariaDB 5.3 includes a User Feedback plugin. This plugin is disabled by
default. If enabled, it submits anonymous basic MariaDB usage
information. This information will be used by the developers to track
trends in MariaDB usage to better guide development efforts.

If you would like to help make MariaDB better, please add
--plugin-load=feedback.so to your my.cnf file! On Windows, add
"feedback=ON" to your my.ini file, or click the checkbox during the
installation of the MSI package.

See http://kb.askmonty.org/en/user-feedback-plugin for more information.



== MariaDB Crash Course book ==========================================

We would also like to mention the book "MariaDB Crash Course", by Ben
Forta. This book -- for beginner to intermediate level users -- will
get you up and running with MariaDB, even if you've never used a
database before. More information is available at:
http://forta.com/books/0321799941/



== Quality ============================================================

The project always strives for quality, but in reality, nothing is
perfect. Please take some time to report any issues you encounter at:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/maria

We hope you enjoy MariaDB 5.3.3-rc!

-- 
Daniel Bartholomew
MariaDB - http://mariadb.org
Monty Program - http://montyprogram.com
AskMonty Knowledgebase - http://kb.askmonty.org