MariaDB 10.4.0 悄悄的於2018年11月9日釋出，當然現在是Alpha版本,按照MariaDB的發版時間推算(一個月一個版本號)，估計
GA版本會在2019年11到12月份釋出。

我們可以看看MariaDB官方此前釋出的10.4的計劃：(Plans for MariaDB 10.4)


Very Likely
  Better Security
   Automatic DOS attacks detection - MariaDB Corporation
   Automatic password crack detection - MariaDB Corporation
   Encryption on client side - MariaDB Corporation
   Password expiration - MariaDB Foundation
   Multiple authentication plugins per user - MariaDB Foundation
   Socket authentication by default (MDEV-12484) - MariaDB Foundation
   Encryption plugin (Tencent Cloud)
   Column encryption (Tencent Cloud)
  Compatibility
   Oracle stage 2 (MDEV-10872)
   CONNECT BY - Alibaba Cloud, MariaDB Corporation & MariaDB Foundation
   MSSQL (?)
  Spider
   Spider (10.4 patches) - Kentoku & MariaDB Corporation
   Tencent Spider patches (10 patches)
   Vertical partitioning - Kentoku
   Distributed Storage Engine (stage 1 of 4)
  Write scaling
   Planning to be done in November-December
  InnoDB
    Instant drop column etc. (MDEV-15562) - MariaDB Corporation
    Better redo log (MDEV-14425) - MariaDB Corporation & Tencent Cloud 
  Performance
    Micro optimization (MDEV-7941) - MariaDB Foundation (Svoj)
    Scalability issues - MariaDB Foundation (Svoj) & IBM
    Moving blocks without using any L? cache (Svoj and Monty)
    MDEV-7487 - semi-join optimisations - (MariaDB Corporation)
    Aggregation on the server (Tencent Cloud)
    GROUP INSERT (Alibaba Cloud) 	
  Re-Entrant Items
    Building block for parallel query and be able to share stored procedures between threads (Stored procedure cache)
    Reading and updating my.cnf from server - MariaDB Corporation
  Other
    Galera 4 - Codership
    MySQL syntax for multi source (CHANNEL) - Alibaba Cloud
    Updates to MyRocks - MariaDB Corporation & Facebook
    Reverse privileges - MariaDB Foundation
    BLOB & optimized VARCHAR for memory tables - MariaDB Corporation (Greatly reduces memory for internal temporary tables)
Rolling Features
  Backup
    Backup from the server through storage engine API, patch for mariabackup (MariaDB Corporation and Alibaba)
  Columnstore
    Columnstore integration (MariaDB Corporation)
  Replication
    GTID in OK Packet (MDEV-11956) - MariaDB Corporation
  Optimizer
    Better ORDER BY LIMIT Optimization (MDEV-8306) - MariaDB Corporation
    Optimizer trace (MDEV-6111) - MariaDB Corporation
    Better histograms (MDEV-12313) - Google Summer of Code project
    Prefiltering - MariaDB Corporation (Igor)
    Better telemetry ???
    Improve single-thread CPU performance ???
  Other
    Virtual host in protocol - Microsoft(?)
    Index on expression - MariaDB Corporation
    Pattern matching for keys
    Downscaling memory on demand/request - MariaDB Corporation (?)
      Closing not used connections
      Reducing buffer-pool and key caches
      Flush all internal caches
    Parallel replication of one table - Tencent Cloud
      Depending on benchmark results
    TIMESTAMP with timezone support (MDEV-7928) - Seth(?)
    Implement all window function features - MDEV-12987, MDEV-6115
    Remove the need to use comments for configuration (MariaDB Corporation)
    Remotely provision slaves (?)
Other Activities Overlapping with 10.4 Release
    Allow community builds - MariaDB Foundation (Vicentiu)
    Docker - MariaDB Foundation (Vicentiu)
    Staging trees - MariaDB Foundation (Vicentiu)
    Python Connector - MariaDB Foundation (Vicentiu)
    Query characteristics being returned to Connector (MariaDB Corporation)
    Reduce the number of open MDEVs (?)	

分析：
在這個10.4版本中會有大量的新特性，其中提及alibaba 4次，tencent 7次。國內的人員開始深度介入MariaDB的開發了。
多年不變的galera 終於要釋出4.0版本了，InnoDB的快速刪除列也實現了。
參考：
https://mariadb.com/kb/en/library/plans-for-mariadb-104/
https://mariadb.com/kb/en/library/what-is-mariadb-104/
https://mariadb.com/kb/en/library/plans-for-103/
https://mariadb.com/kb/en/library/changes-improvements-in-mariadb-103/