MariaDB announced the general availability of MariaDB Enterprise Platform 2025, the latest major release of its enterprise database solution that now supports AI applications in addition to a full range of transactional, analytical, and semi-structured tools.By extending the MariaDB database with native open source vector search capabilities, organizations adopting MariaDB can leverage the same database solution and skill set to advance their AI initiatives, the company said.
“MariaDB is known for its versatility, and that’s a core part of our focus for MariaDB Enterprise Platform 2025,” said Vikas Mathur, chief product officer, MariaDB. “Bringing vector search natively to the database server lets customers extend the same database they’re already using throughout their organization to new AI applications. We’ve also prioritized peace of mind for our enterprise customers with this release, adding tools to make upgrading versions a breeze.”
MariaDB Enterprise Platform 2025 includes updated versions of its core database, MariaDB Enterprise Server 11.4, its advanced database proxy, MariaDB MaxScale 25.01, and tools and support that deliver peace of mind for organizations running mission-critical applications.
MariaDB Enterprise Platform 2025 introduces new native vector search capabilities within the core database engine that are 100% open source.
Vector search enables searching unstructured data by value and by semantics without the need to integrate multiple databases or compromising your system’s reliability or security. It can also help LLMs deliver more accurate and contextually relevant results using retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) on enterprise data.
Using MariaDB’s approach to vector search, customers and organizations are enabled to keep their database stack simple. Leveraging their existing MariaDB database, customers eliminate the need to maintain separate vector databases. MariaDB’s use of vector embedding is native and not an add-on capability, which simplifies management and allows for a seamless integration with existing SQL operations.
In addition to vector search, this release expands JSON support with new functions that make working with JSON data more intuitive and efficient. These new functions cover everything from basic operations to advanced data manipulation.
MariaDB Enterprise Platform 2025 adds critical features that enable enterprises to evaluate potential impacts on performance or stability with a new database version before upgrading in a production environment.
Workload capture and replay, a new feature in MaxScale, allows customers to capture the workload of a production system, such as queries, sessions and transactions, and replay them in a test environment. The captured workloads can be used to verify that upgrades of the MariaDB database behave as expected and to measure the effects configuration changes may have.
MariaDB Enterprise Platform 2025 has a revamped optimizer in the database engine which incorporates a granular and refined cost model that considers state-of-the-art SSD disks and different characteristics of storage engines.
Now, MariaDB’s database can fully leverage the lower latency and high throughput offered by modern storage devices, automatically choosing the fastest execution plan for complex queries.
MariaDB Enterprise Platform 2025 adds several new features for database administrators (DBAs) that make managing the database even easier, including:
- Reduced operational downtime with a new online schema change feature that allows for a non-locking ALTER TABLE built into the server, which enables writing to a table while the ALTER TABLE is running.
- Improved efficiency with a new optimistic ALTER TABLE for replication that greatly reduces replication lag by making ALTER TABLE operations two phased operations.
- Enriched enterprise-class protection with new security features that enable TLS encryption by default, add more granular privileges, and introduce a new plugin to prevent reuse of old passwords.
- Enhanced partitioning management with new operations such as converting partitions to tables and vice versa, and new enhancements to managing system versioning partitions, making database maintenance more flexible and efficient.
This release comes on the heels of new leadership and management announcements over the last four months.
MariaDB Enterprise Platform is available to download now for all MariaDB customers.
For more information about this news, visit www.mariadb.com.