The MariaDB Foundation has announced that MariaDB 10.11 will be available as an LTS release, meaning that the 10.11 series will have a much longer one-year period than the short-term supported MariaDB 10.10 series.

MariaDB 10.6 is the latest LTS previously announced, and its support time is from 2021-07-06 to 2026-07-06. This LTS announcement means that the official has updated the MariaDB 10.11 maintenance policy accordingly, and will enter a specific date after GA.

The announcement notes that the decision to make MariaDB 10.11 an LTS was made for a number of reasons, specifically:

• First and foremost, the purpose of LTS is to reassure users. Especially for Linux distributions, it is guaranteed that a version will receive regular updates for a long time during the life of the product.
• Secondly,MariaDB aspectshope to do our bestmatchRelease schedule for major Linux distributions. “In cooperation with Otto Kekäläinen of Debian,We have scheduled this release to meet Debian 12’sstandard, which will probably get us to Ubuntu 23.04 as well. That said, we’re not tying ourselves to one release, our attempt with each LTS is to be the best for as many releases as possible. “
• Third, MariaDB expects to provide users withStability comesSimplify the life of your user base.Stability means two things: thereliablehave stable releases in the sense of not introducing breaking changes in the sense that no new features (and thus new bugs) are introduced in bugfix releases. This is the exact opposite of the MySQL 8.0 evergreen pattern, where new major features and incompatibilities were introduced in a stable release while still calling it stable.
• Fourth, MariaDB 10.7, MariaDB 10.8, MariaDB 10.9, MariaDB 10.10, and MariaDB 10.11 released a host of new features.While any of these releases will work, some users prefer to use only the LTS releases.
• Fifth, MariaDB made adjustments to the release of the LTS version in order to meet its joint announcement with MariaDB Corporation nearly a year agoUser expectations set at the time of the new release model.“In cooperation with Linux distributions, some release series will be selected for longer maintenance windows, which are expected to occur at least every other year”. Therefore, they chose 10.11 after careful consideration, given the current feature set, upcoming new features, and the time gap with 10.6.

Compared with MariaDB 10.6, there will be more new features introduced in MariaDB 10.11. for example:Unicode Collation Algorithm 14.0.0 (UCA-14.0.0), introduced in MariaDB 10.10, based on the unicode.org specification released in 2021-09. “This should handle reasonable ordering of UTF charsets in most languages, as we describe in Jira MDEV-27009.We are still refining the knowledge baseOverview of Character Sets and Collationsas well asSupported character sets and collationsDocumentation in . “

It is worth mentioning that, in the recent MariaDB Server Fest On , the Wikimedia Foundation has a case study related to upgrading between LTS versions, interested users can pay attention to it.

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