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Yesterday, the team at MariaDB announced the release of MariaDB Enterprise Server 10.4, which is code named as “restful nights”. It is a hardened and secured server which is also different from MariaDB’s Community Server. This release is focused on solving enterprise customer needs, offering them greater reliability, stability as well as long-term support in production environments. MariaDB Enterprise Server 10.4 and its backported versions will be available to customers by the end of the month as part of the MariaDB Platform subscription.

The official blog post reads, “For the past couple of years, we have been collaborating very closely with some of our large enterprise customers. From that collaboration, it has become clear that their needs differ vastly from that of the average community user. Not only do they have different requirements on quality and robustness, they also have different requirements for features to support production environments. That’s why we decided to invest heavily into creating a MariaDB Enterprise Server, to address the needs of our customers with mission critical production workloads.”

MariaDB Enterprise Server 10.4 comes with added functionality for enterprises that are running MariaDB at scale in production environments. It also involves new levels of testing and is shipped in by default secure configuration. It also includes the same features of MariaDB Server 10.4, including bitemporal tables, an expanded set of instant schema changes and a number of improvements to authentication and authorization (e.g., password expiration and automatic/manual account locking)

Max Mether, VP of Server Product Management, MariaDB Corporation, wrote in an email to us, “The new version of MariaDB Server is a hardened database that transforms open source into enterprise open source.”

He further added, “We worked closely with our customers to add the features and quality they need to run in the most demanding production environments out-of-the-box. With MariaDB Enterprise Server, we’re focused on top-notch quality, comprehensive security, fast bug fixes and features that let our customers run at internet-scale performance without downtime.”

James Curtis, Senior Analyst, Data Platforms and Analytics, 451 Research, said, “MariaDB has maintained a solid place in the database landscape during the past few years.”

He added, “The company is taking steps to build on this foundation and expand its market presence with the introduction of MariaDB Enterprise Server, an open source, enterprise-grade offering targeted at enterprise clients anxious to stand up production-grade MariaDB environments.”

Reliability and stability

MariaDB Enterprise Server 10.4 offers reliability and stability that is required for production environments. In this server, even bugs are fixed that further help in maintaining reliability. The key enterprise features are backported for the ones running earlier versions of MariaDB Server, and provide long-term support.

Security

Unsecured databases are most of the times the reason for data breaches. But the MariaDB Enterprise Server 10.4is configured with security settings to support enterprise applications. All non-GA plugins will be disabled by default in order to reduce the risks incurred when using unsupported features. Further, the default configuration is changed to enforce strong security, durability and consistency.

Enterprise backup

MariaDB Enterprise Server 10.4 offers enterprise backup that brings operational efficiency to customers with large databases and further breaks up the backups into non-blocking stages. So this way, writes and schema changes can occur during backups than waiting for backup to complete.

Auditing capabilities

This server adds secure, stronger and easier auditing capabilities by logging all changes to the audit configuration. It also logs detailed connection information that gives the customers a comprehensive view of changes made to the database.

End-to-end encryption

It also offers end-to-end encryption for multi-master clusters where the transaction buffers are encrypted that ensure that the data is secure.

Learn more about this news on the official web page.

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