August 25, 2025
Skeema v1.13 has been released! This new version provides significant performance improvements, and adds support for recent database server versions such as MariaDB 11.8 LTS. It also includes important deprecation logging to help you prepare for upcoming changes in Skeema v2.
Performance improvements
When operating on a directory with many hundreds of CREATE statements, Skeema typically performs reasonably well as long as the database server is located in the same geographic region. However, performance suffers when the server is more remote, due to the significant network latency. This problem can be solved by using either Docker workspaces or temp-schema offloading, but these features require a fair amount of additional configuration. As an easier alternative, many users ramp up temp-schema-threads, but this has diminishing returns due to excessive contention on the server.
In order to greatly improve this situation out of the box, Skeema v1.13 introduces a new enum option called temp-schema-mode, which is intended to replace temp-schema-threads entirely. This option offers easier-to-use configuration via descriptive modes, and includes brand new optimizations which greatly reduce the number of network round-trips for the workspace queries.
Furthermore, when tuning workspace settings and comparing their effect, you can now see exact performance timing information for each stage of the workspace process by simply enabling debug logging. This makes it easier to see the exact differences between each temp-schema-mode in your environment.
Skeema v1.13 also includes a number of other performance enhancements:
- Faster workspace cleanup logic for both temp-schema and Docker
- Improved support for Docker tmpfs data mounts in all server container images
- Automatic network compression when operating on large seed data
INSERTstatements - Fewer network round-trips for code paths that involve checking table sizes or lack of rows
MariaDB 11.8 and MySQL 9.3-9.4
The latest MariaDB LTS release series, MariaDB 11.8, is now fully supported by Skeema. This database server version includes two nice improvements which affect DDL and schema management:
- Stored procedures and functions can now specify default values for their parameters (MDEV-10862)
- UPDATE triggers can now be limited to specific columns (MDEV-34551)
Skeema v1.13 also adds full support for MySQL 9.3 and 9.4, the most recent quarterly innovation releases from Oracle.
The latest MariaDB quarterly rolling (innovation) release, MariaDB 12.0, isn’t officially supported quite yet due to some complexities with a new trigger-related feature (MDEV-10164). However, aside from lack of support for that feature, all of our integration tests pass successfully, and there are no other known issues using Skeema v1.13.0 with MariaDB 12.0. We anticipate adding support for multi-event triggers in our next point release this autumn.
Preparation for Skeema v2
As previously announced, Skeema v2 will include some minor changes that are not backwards-compatible with v1. This primarily includes dropping support for some ancient database server flavors (MySQL 5.5 and MariaDB 10.1), while also removing several unnecessary options.
In order to help you check your Skeema configuration for functionality that may be affected by these changes, Skeema v1.13 officially deprecates those old flavors and options, and includes new logging to identify them. Any usage of a now-deprecated server flavor or option will cause a warning-level log message.
Additionally, in some cases where an option will have a different default value in v2 than in v1, debug-level messages are logged if your configuration does not override the default.
For more information on Skeema v1.13.0, full release notes are available on GitHub. To stay up-to-date with release announcements and blog posts, follow us on Bluesky.