MariaDB 13.0 goes Stable, DuckDB speeds up Magento 63x: October newsletter

The MariaDB Foundation published its monthly newsletter on 1 October 2026, summing up September's activity, from version 13.0's move to Stable to a test of the DuckDB storage engine applied to a Magento workload. For anyone running MariaDB instances in production, or offering them as hosting, these are developments that directly affect upgrade planning and the choice of storage engines for reporting.

The test: DuckDB on a million Magento orders

Magento keeps orders, order lines and invoices on InnoDB, an engine suited to transactional workloads. For analytical reporting, Roman Nozdrin wanted to check whether DuckDB could speed up a real-world report without replacing the operational database. He generated a million orders and two million order lines, then ran the full Magento orders report in three configurations:

Configuration	Time
InnoDB only	18.5 s
Orders table on DuckDB	8.3 s
Orders and order lines on DuckDB	0.29 s (63 times faster)

The analytical copies were created with plain SQL (CREATE TABLE ... LIKE, INSERT ... SELECT, then ALTER TABLE ... ENGINE=DUCKDB), leaving the operational tables on InnoDB. The author himself notes the test's limitations: a single type of report, generated data, no concurrency testing. The 63x figure is as stated by the author on the official MariaDB blog, not independently measured by UptimeMag. The DuckDB engine ships as a package with MariaDB 13.0.2, in gamma status: fine for testing, not for production use.

MariaDB 13.0 is Stable

The 13.0.2 series completed its journey from Preview to Release Candidate to Stable on 17 September: between RC and Stable, there were 604 commits, 1,701 files touched, 23,748 lines of test code added and 335 MDEVs closed. Highlights include: deeper Oracle PL/SQL compatibility (REF CURSOR, RECORD types), UPDATE ... RETURNING, the QB_NAME() optimiser hint, InnoDB log archiving, changes to the Performance Schema digest, replication improvements and security fixes reported through MariaDB's HackerOne programme. 13.0 is a rolling release, not an LTS: anyone needing a long maintenance window should stick with 11.8 LTS.

TideSQL 5 now installable as a package

The TidesDB-based storage engine reaches version 5.0.0, built on TidesDB 10, and can now be built and packaged with MariaDB Foundry as a standard RPM, DEB or tar.gz, outside the MariaDB source tree: you install MariaDB, then add the engine without having to recompile the server.

Sponsors and adoption

AWS has renewed its Diamond sponsorship for the fourth year running (since 2023), while Kamatera and Elestio have come on board as Silver Sponsors in September. The Foundation's monthly Adoption Index, which combines 24 metrics covering downloads, contributors, community and social activity, rose 126% year on year; downloads from mariadb.org have quintupled (526,572 in August) and pulls of the official Docker image reached 25.3 million a month.

Connectors and cloud

Connector/C 3.4.11 and 3.3.21 were released on 29 September, alongside Connector/R2DBC 1.4.2, 1.3.2 and 1.2.4. Amazon RDS for MariaDB now offers the Q3 community releases 10.11.19, 11.4.13, 11.8.9 and 12.3.3, which include post-quantum TLS key exchange.

Source: official MariaDB Foundation newsletter, October 2026 (mariadb.org).