MariaDB Drops Q3 2026 Maintenance Releases and Confirms 10.6 is Done
Four LTS branches get updates, including a final farewell patch for MariaDB 10.6.
MariaDB just published maintenance updates for four LTS branches of its server, and if you're still running MariaDB 10.6, it's time to pack up. The foundation marked the end-of-life for 10.6, publishing its final binary, 10.6.28, on August 13 as a farewell patch.
If you're keeping score, here's what landed this week. MariaDB Server 12.3.3 is the newest, followed by 11.8.9, 11.4.13, and 10.11.19. These aren't feature dumps. You're looking at bug fixes, stability improvements, and patches from 19 external contributors.
The bigger news is for 10.6. Community maintenance ended back on July 6, but the foundation took the time to drop one last binary as a goodbye. Frédéric Descamps put it pretty clearly: there will be no 10.6.29. Not a single one.
10.6 held the line since July 2021. It was the last LTS release under the previous model, serving about five years of community support. It powered a lot of production environments along the way. Now that it's gone, the foundation can focus maintenance effort on fewer branches.
What's in the new releases
12.3.3 carries some weight. This is the newest LTS, GA'd just last month on May 28. The 12.3 series introduced a new binary logging implementation and changed innodb_snapshot_isolation to default to ON. If you were relying on REPEATABLE READ behavior from older versions, that's a potential breaking change. The foundation claims 4x write performance improvements and better scalability for AI workloads.
It's been six months since 12.3 hit GA. The write performance claims were among the more aggressive marketing we've seen from them. The patches in 12.3.3 don't change those numbers, but they do address regressions that tend to show up in real-world deployments. You should also expect ongoing development work across the server codebase to keep rolling in.
Then there's 11.8. It arrived in June 2025 and marked a shift to a yearly LTS model. You'll notice its community support window is shorter than the older branches. 11.8 hits community EOL in June 2028, while 11.4 lasts until May 2029. The tradeoff is source-code fixes continue longer. It's a strategic move to keep the codebase manageable as more series pile up.
So where should you go if you're migrating off 10.6? The foundation recommends targeting 11.8 or 12.3. Don't just bump to 10.11 thinking it's a safe step. You'll get the actual improvements by jumping straight to the newer branches. Direct upgrades across major versions are supported, so you don't need intermediate steps.
11.4 and 10.11 also get their updates. 11.4 is the workhorse with community support until 2029, and 10.11 is the oldest active branch, wrapping up in February 2028. If you're on either of those, make sure you apply the latest patch.
The full changelogs and detailed notes are available on the MariaDB Foundation site. Head here for the 12.3, 11.8, 11.4, and 10.11 announcements, and here for the 10.6 EOL notice. Keep in mind that testing in staging is always the right call before rolling anything out to production.
