MariaDB Migrator reaches GA: MySQL-to-MariaDB tool is not open source
MariaDB Migrator 1.5.0 exits beta with a faster parallel engine. Official documentation, however, classifies it as proprietary software, not open source.
UptimeMag editorial team · 16 October 2026 · 1 min read
MariaDB announced general availability on 12 October 2026 for MariaDB Migrator 1.5.0, the tool that automates migration from MySQL to MariaDB. For those managing hosting infrastructure and planning production database migrations, the news matters less for the feature itself than for a detail the vendor's newsletter leaves in the background: the licence.
What's new in GA
The parallel transfer engine, mariadb-mtk, reaches version 3.7.37 and now parallelises within a single large table as well as across multiple tables, moving rows in session without an intermediate dump file.
Supported sources are MySQL 5.7, 8.0 and 8.4, including Amazon RDS; destinations include MariaDB Community, Enterprise Server and MariaDB Cloud. The tool runs on Linux x86-64 and ARM64.
| Mode | Suited for | Mechanism |
|---|---|---|
| Serial Streaming Copy | Small databases | Sequential streaming with mariadb-dump | mariadb |
| Parallel Streaming Copy | Large datasets | Parallel worker sessions via mariadb-mtk |
| Offline Copy | Air-gapped environments | Decoupled dump and load |
| Replication | Critical cutovers | Continuous synchronisation via binlog |
A conversational interface option works through the MCP server integrated in mariadb-shell, still in pre-release with general availability expected in the fourth quarter.
Open source or proprietary?
MariaDB's official documentation describes the Migrator as MariaDB proprietary software, provided free of charge to MariaDB customers and partners under approved terms of use, distributed from the community downloads page. This distinction matters for those considering use on third-party customer infrastructure without an active MariaDB contract: it is not a tool you can freely redistribute or integrate into your own product, contrary to what the "open source" label in launch communications might suggest.
The package is downloaded from MariaDB's official migration tools page; before using it in production, as the documentation itself recommends, best practice is to test on a non-production target.
Written with the help of artificial intelligence and checked by the editors (EU AI Act, art. 50).