MariaDB 11.8 LTS: Release Highlights You’ve Been Waiting For

If you’re building with data, there’s a good chance you’ve crossed paths with MariaDB.

This week, the MariaDB Foundation released version 11.8 LTS, its latest long-term support edition.

And it’s not just another maintenance release. This one is packed with upgrades aimed squarely at developers working on AI, modern applications, and high-performance systems.

Let’s walk through what’s new — and why it matters.

AI Inside Your Database? Yes, Really.

The headline feature of MariaDB 11.8 is MariaDB Vector — a built-in engine for running vector similarity searches.

If you’re working with machine learning or natural language processing, this is huge.

Vector search is how systems like chatbots or recommendation engines “understand” meaning. Traditionally, you’d need a separate vector database to do this. Now, MariaDB can handle it natively.

Here’s what that looks like:

• A new VECTOR data type for storing embeddings
• Smart indexing built for nearest-neighbor lookups
• Functions like VEC_DISTANCE() to calculate similarity using cosine or Euclidean distance