MariaDB Foundation releases TAF 4.0: beta support for PostgreSQL

On 28 September 2026, the MariaDB Foundation released version 4.0 of the Test Automation Framework (TAF), the framework used to measure and compare database performance. This was reported on the official MariaDB.org blog. According to the Foundation, this release marks the broadest change in the project's history: it reorganises how workloads are run, tagged and analysed on MariaDB, MySQL and, from this version onwards, PostgreSQL as well.\n\n## Key changes\n\nThe most significant change is end-to-end support for PostgreSQL, still in beta: it includes a dedicated database plugin (PR #7), along with updates to sysbench-lua and the RUN SQL library for PostgreSQL builds. The Foundation explicitly invites feedback and pull requests on this part.\n\nTAF 4.0 also introduces the ability to embed the database configuration directly in the user properties file, with a clear order of precedence: command-line overrides first, then the inline configuration block, and finally a reference to an external file (db_config_file). The "winning" configuration is written to the properties file auto-generated for each test case and archived alongside the results, eliminating configuration discrepancies between different runs.\n\nOther changes include: a temporary database configuration file generated at runtime for each run; recovery mode, which now re-runs iteration 1 of the recovered data store to eliminate offsets; new command-line options such as --test-case-tag and --dump-run-state; new system saturation collection scripts (taf_collect_mpstat.sh, taf_collect_pidstat.sh, taf_collect_perf_sched.sh, among others); and a new tool, ResultsCompareRaw.pl, for regenerating HTML reports from raw data on any metric.\n\nSeveral changes, the Foundation writes, were requested directly by Monty Widenius, creator of MySQL and MariaDB, in particular via issue MDEV-39497, which gave rise to the --test-case-tag option.\n\n## Hardware and contributions\n\nDevelopment and validation work was carried out on hosts provided by Hetzner as hardware sponsor: one machine with an Intel i5-13500 CPU (20 vCPUs, 14 cores) and 62 GB of RAM running AlmaLinux 9.7, and a second with an AMD EPYC 9454 CPU (96 vCPUs, 48 cores) and 125 GB of RAM running AlmaLinux 9.8. Contributors credited include Virtuozzo (a sponsor of the Foundation), Lukas Oliva for the PostgreSQL plugin, and Viktor Ganeles for recovery mode.\n\nThe code is available as a GitHub release on the official TAF repository.\n