June 25, 2026
Skeema v1.14 is now available! This release adds support for the latest MySQL and MariaDB LTS version series, new configuration hooks for obtaining database credentials directly from external scripts, and additional deprecation logging to prep for Skeema v2.
MySQL 9.7, MariaDB 12.3, and Aurora 8.4
Over the past two months, new long-term support (LTS) version series of both MySQL and MariaDB have been released, and these are fully supported by Skeema v1.14.
MySQL 9.7 is the LTS release of the MySQL 9.x series, and it will be supported by Oracle for eight years. New table functionality in MySQL 9.x includes the VECTOR column type, several improvements to foreign keys (cascades now in binlog; inline column REFERENCES clauses now create FKs), and support for “JSON duality views” which define a two-way mapping between relational multi-table SQL queries and virtual JSON documents.
MariaDB 12.3 is the LTS release of the MariaDB 12.x series, with community edition patches by MariaDB for three years. New table/DDL functionality in 12.x includes foreign key namespace improvements (per-table instead of per-schema – a great improvement for OSC tools), an XMLTYPE column type for XML data, improved algorithms for PARTITION BY KEY, and triggers that fire on multiple events (e.g. BEFORE INSERT OR UPDATE).
Even if your company doesn’t plan to upgrade to these server versions for some time, Skeema’s reserved word linter is essential for early detection of future conflicts, such as MySQL 9.x’s new reserved words LIBRARY and EXTERNAL.
Last but not least, AWS has now made available Aurora for MySQL 8.4. Skeema Premium v1.14 includes a minor tweak to its SSH tunnel support to account for Aurora 8.4 strictly requiring TLS for all connections.
Shellout hooks for password, user, host options
A number of Skeema options have supported use of environment variables for years, providing simple dynamic configuration. However, in some situations it would be cleaner to express a dynamic value directly inside Skeema’s configuration files, to clearly define where the option value is coming from. For example, when obtaining a database password from a secrets store, it may be preferable to configure the secrets store CLI command directly in a .skeema file, rather than setting an env variable outside of Skeema in a different part of an automation pipeline.
To solve this, Skeema v1.14 adds the ability for the password, user, and host options to be set to a `backtick-wrapped` external command, similar to the syntax already allowed by the schema option.
As an example, you could configure Skeema to directly obtain passwords from AWS Secrets Manager by using this in a .skeema file:
password=`aws secretsmanager get-secret-value --secret-id ID --query SecretString --output text | jq -r '.password'`
When the password is needed, if the configured value is wrapped in backticks, Skeema will invoke the value as a command and capture its STDOUT for use as the password value. Any leading or trailing whitespace is stripped automatically.
These command-lines also support use of placeholder variables such as {ENVIRONMENT}. This way, if you have multiple database clusters, and/or different credentials between prod and dev environments, you can programmatically obtain the right values while using a single reusable command-line, configured once in a top-level .skeema file.
The inclusion of host here may be surprising for some Skeema users, since host-wrapper already exists for complex sharding and service discovery use-cases. The ability to configure a shellout directly in host is intended as a simpler alternative, specifically for less complex situations where there’s no need for lookup keys or a generic command-line that applies to multiple clusters.
More preparation for Skeema v2
As announced in March, Skeema v2 will drop support for MySQL 5.x and MariaDB 10.1-10.3 on the server side, as well as dropping Intel Mac builds on the client side. Skeema v1.14 adds deprecation warning logging for these systems accordingly, supplementing the deprecation logging from Skeema v1.13.
For more information on Skeema v1.14.0, full release notes are available on GitHub. To stay up-to-date with release announcements and blog posts, follow us on Bluesky.