What is MariaDB 5.5

MariaDB 5.5 is MariaDB 5.3 + MySQL 5.5 plus a few minor extensions:

• Improved thread pool (--thread-handling=pool-of-threads --thread-pool-size=#), comparable to the closed source feature in MySQL Enterprise.
• Updates to performance schema tables are not stored in binary log and thus not replicated to slaves. This is to ensure that monitoring of the master will not cause a slower performance on all slaves. This also fixes a crash on the slaves.

The state of MariaDB 5.5 is that we have just completed the merge with MySQL 5.5 and we are now testing it. We will release it as a beta as soon as we have gotten it to work with our extended test suite on all platforms. This may take a few weeks.

New features are added to MariaDB 5.6.