MariaDB 13.0

MariaDB 13.0 reached stable (general availability) status in September 2026. We covered it in the news.

What changed

UPDATE ... RETURNING. Update rows and get the changed values back in one atomic statement, without a separate SELECT that races with other writers. PostgreSQL has long had it, and it was one of the more commonly missed features when moving the other way.

UPDATE orders
SET status = 'shipped', shipped_at = NOW()
WHERE status = 'pending' AND warehouse_id = 3
RETURNING id, customer_id, shipped_at;

InnoDB log archiving. Archiving redo logs supports point-in-time recovery: restore a backup, then replay the log up to just before the bad DELETE.

Optimizer Trace improvements make it easier to see why the query planner chose a plan, and there is more SQL standard compatibility work.

Should you upgrade?

Major database versions deserve a test first. Take a full backup, restore it into a 13.0 instance, run your application’s test suite, and compare slow query behaviour before upgrading production. Our MariaDB and MySQL basics guide covers backups with mariadb-dump and the upgrade tooling.

Installing

Distribution packages lag major releases, so use MariaDB’s official repositories for 13.0. The repository configuration tool on mariadb.org generates the exact setup for your distribution and version. After installing:

sudo systemctl enable --now mariadb
sudo mariadb-secure-installation
mariadb --version

For a new project where you are choosing a database, our PostgreSQL basics guide covers the main alternative.

Verify Your Download

Packages from the official repositories are signed with the MariaDB signing key, which the repository setup installs. Tarballs in the archive have matching checksum files.