MariaDB® 10.5 Full Support in cPanel & WHM® Version 98

We are very pleased to announce that we’ll be releasing MariaDB 10.5 in version 98! 

MariaDB 10.5 was released in December of 2019, and will be fully supported in cPanel and WHM version 98. We will still provide currently supported MariaDB offerings, though we strongly encourage you to update to the latest version. For more information on what’s new in MariaDB 10.5 please read their Changes and Improvements in MariaDB 10.5 update page.

How To Upgrade To MariaDB 10.5

You can use WHM’s MySQL/MariaDB Upgrade interface (WHM >> Home >> SQL Server >> MySQL/MariaDB Upgrade) to upgrade the database on your server to a supported version when MariaDB 10.5 is available.

Looking To The Future 

We know MariaDB 10.5’s arrival in cPanel has been delayed. There were some issues with MariaDB and databases as a whole that we felt needed to be addressed before we could release MariaDB 10.5. We’d like to let you in on a few of these things and what changes we made.  We spent time carefully weighing our options as well as their impact on our customers as a result of issues with past MariaDB minor version releases. We also recognized that we were encountering more and more obstacles to implementing new database versions to our customers (both MariaDB and MySQL). As a result of these two concerns, we decided on a multi-faceted approach to improving this integral piece of the software.

Continuous Integration

We touched base with the very helpful folks over at MariaDB and together we came up with a two-part plan to solve this problem. As a result of these discussions, we have begun performing both internal testing on minor version releases and providing custom testing to MariaDB. 

Internal Pre-Release Testing 

Minor MariaDB and MySQL releases are available directly to you and are obtained when performing a yum update,  cPanel does not provide these as it is not necessary to perform an upgrade on the service for a minor version release. Historically we have only done extensive testing of major version releases, because of previous issues with minor version releases from MariaDB and their negative impact on our customers we chose to begin performing nightly testing on their minor version pre-release builds. This allows us to report to MariaDB issues before they ever hit our customers. 

External MariaDB Testing

In order to ensure that MariaDB was able to test on cPanel specific issues, we wrote some new tests for MariaDB as well as provided them some existing tests to use when testing their development builds. We believe these actions should help keep issues like what we’ve experienced in the past from happening again, resulting in far less impact to our customers who use MariaDB. 

Database Infrastructure Refactor

Another hurdle we’ve been trying to get over in the past few years is the complexity of our database infrastructure. We’ve spent some time researching and planning a how to make the most impactful change and came to the conclusion we needed to simplify the database framework in the product. We are currently in the process of performing that refactor and will be releasing MariaDB 10.5 in it as soon as it’s done, this is anticipated by the release of v98. The work being done to the infrastructure we believe will drastically improve our ability to get these upgrades available to our customers in a much shorter amount of time now and in the future. 

As always, if you have any feedback or comments, please let us know. We are here to help in the best ways we can. You’ll find us on Discord, the cPanel forums, and Reddit. Be sure to also follow us on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.