MariaDB 11.8 LTS adds vector search, fixes Year 2038, upgrades Unicode support

MariaDB 11.8 is the 2025 long-term support release, following version 11.4. It supports direct upgrades from MariaDB 10.0 and most MySQL versions, with upgrade processes typically completing in seconds, except for cases involving system-versioned tables due to internal timestamp changes.

The release fully integrates MariaDB Vector, enabling AI and machine learning workloads through a native VECTOR type, nearest-neighbor search indexing, and CPU-specific SIMD optimizations for AVX2, AVX512, ARM, and Power10 architectures. Building on this, developers have access to vector functions such as VEC_DISTANCE(), VEC_DISTANCE_EUCLIDEAN(), VEC_DISTANCE_COSINE(), and binary or text conversion utilities, all now part of the LTS branch for similarity search use cases like retrieval-augmented generation.

Additional changes include an extended TIMESTAMP range through 2106 to solve the Year 2038 issue, a switch to utf8mb4 as the default character set, and UCA 14.0.0 collation support. Other improvements cover the new PARSEC authentication plugin, parallel backup and restore, replication enhancements, better observability tools, and developer-focused updates like ROW-returning stored functions and improved system-versioned table handling.