Congratulations to Team MariaDB at MariaDB Corporation and MariaDB Foundation for releasing MariaDB 10.4.6 as Generally Available (GA) last week on 18 June 2019. This release is very exciting for Galera Cluster users as it comes with Galera 4 (it is now the first server to come with it!), with Galera wsrep library version 26.4.2.

What can Galera Cluster users expect from MariaDB 10.4? Some high level features include:

• Streaming replication — a huge boost to large transaction support, since the node breaks transactions into fragments, replicates and certifies it across all secondary nodes while the transaction is still in progress. Read more about it in our dedicated documentation on streaming replication as well as a guide on using streaming replication (yes, you have to enable it first).
• Galera System Tables — there are three new tables added to the mysql database: wsrep_cluster, wsrep_cluster_members, and wsrep_streaming_log. As a database administrator, you can see the cluster activity — again, please read the documentation on system tables, and note that if you do not have streaming replication enabled, you will not see anything in wsrep_streaming_log.
• Synchronisation functions — these are SQL functions for use in wsrep synchronisation operations, like getting the GTID based on the last write or last seen transaction, as well as setting the node to wait for a specific GTID to replicate and apply, before executing the next transaction. 

But that is not all — recently a presentation by our CEO, Seppo Jaakola, can also shed some light into new features, and the roadmap. Please read: Galera 4 in MariaDB 10.4 for more information.

Both Team Codership and Team MariaDB have worked hard to ensure that there can be rolling upgrades performed from Galera Cluster in MariaDB Server 10.3 to MariaDB Server 10.4, and we highly recommend that you read the upgrade documentation: Upgrading from MariaDB 10.3 to MariaDB 10.4 with Galera Cluster.

So what are you waiting for? Give MariaDB Server 10.4 with Galera Cluster 4 a try (download it), and provide us some feedback. Bugs can of course be reported to the MariaDB Jira. We will monitor the maria-discuss and maria-developers mailing lists but don’t forget to ask specific Galera Cluster questions at our Google Group.