We are pleased to announce the availability of a preview of the MariaDB 13.1 series. MariaDB 13.1 will be a rolling release.

MariaDB 13.1 introduces a lot of new features. Many of them were implemented by our awesome community contributors. See the complete list below:

• DENY clause for access control a.k.a. “negative grants” (MDEV-14443)
• Auto-adding new partitions for PARTITION BY RANGE (MDEV-15621)
• Locking full table scan fails to use table-level locking (MDEV-24813)
• The default utf8 character set is now utf8mb4 (MDEV-30041)
• NEW and OLD in a trigger can be used as row variables (MDEV-34723)
• ADAPTIVE_HASH_INDEX = { YES | NO | DEFAULT } can specify per InnoDB table whether to use AHI (MDEV-37070)
• XMLISVALID() schema validation function (MDEV-37262)
• Adaptive hash index statistics is shown in ANALYZE FORMAT=JSON (MDEV-38305)
• Optimizer Context Recorder to record the optimizer data and then analyze query optimization on another server instance (MDEV-38701)
• innodb_tablespace_size_warning_threshold and innodb_tablespace_size_warning_pct variables to get a warning when InnoDB tablespace is getting close to full (before it’s 100% full and the service is disrupted) (MDEV-38936)
• Local routine variables usable in PREPARE/EXECUTE/DEALLOCATE and OPEN ... FOR (MDEV-39022)
• Package-wide TYPE declarations (MDEV-39587)
• CHECK TABLE supports MEMORY tables (MDEV-40030)
• Support for JSON operators column->path and column->>path (MDEV-13594) — contributed by Mohd Jarir Khan
• Improve error reporting of mysqlbinlog when used with --flashback (MDEV-20749) — contributed by Shawn K
• Add formatted column support to JSON_TABLE (MDEV-25727) — contributed by Varun Deep Saini
• Ignored domain ids skip validation when connecting to a master (MDEV-28213) — contributed by Abdelrahman Hedia
• New statement CREATE TRIGGER FOR { STARTUP | SHUTDOWN } (MDEV-30645) — based on a contribution by André Alves
• Optional lengths for string types: VARCHAR[(N)] (MDEV-31414) — contributed by Osama Nabih
• mariadbd --validate-config to check the configuration for validity without starting the server (MDEV-31527) — contributed by Abdelrahman Hedia
• mariadb-dump no longer includes generated column values in a dump (MDEV-32362) — contributed by Fariha Shaikh, AWS
• INFORMATION_SCHEMA.VECTOR_INDEXES provides information about vector indexes (MDEV-34805) — contributed by Ahmed Hegazy
• parsec_iterations session variables allows to set the number of PBKDF2 rounds for the PARSEC plugin (MDEV-35254) — contributed by Dearsh Oberoi
• AND/OR can now short-circuit the execution for any argument not in a strictly left-to-right fashion (MDEV-37713, MDEV-37714) — contributed by Jaeheon Shim
• XXH3, XXH32, XXH64, XXH128 family of hash functions (MDEV-38180) — contributed by Abhinav Mishra
• MEMORY tables support variable-length data types, VARCHAR and TEXT/BLOB (MDEV-38975) — contributed by Arcadiy Ivanov
• slave_skip_errors variable can be modified without server restart (MDEV-7394)
• resolveip utility is refactored to use modern IPv6-compatible network API functions (MDEV-39169) — contributed by Michal Schorm
• Support the syntax of SELECT ... INTO inside parentheses for compatibility with MySQL (MDEV-39176) — contributed by Long Jin
• struct Optional_metadata_fields is refactored to use MariaDB internal data classes, as prescribed by the Coding Style (MDEV-38144) — contributed by Eric Hayter

Please, keep in mind, that features in the preview are not guaranteed to reach a 13.1.1-RC release. Those features that will not be considered stable enough for a Release Candidate, will appear in a later release after they improve.