Hi everyone. This question is for the Hosting Support team.
Short question is: could we expect to use MySQL 10.4 or higher soon?.
Follow a more detailed version of my question.
Thanks in advance for your time!
On the site epiz_33637864 I’m trying to test latest Moodle release (Moodle 4)
Installation can’t proceed because the MySQL server required is 10.4 and the currently available at infinityfree is 10.3.27.
I’ve learnt from other posts in this forum that DB servers wont be updated individually (which seems totally fair). But it would be maravelous -if it exists- to have a plan or even better, a schedule regarding MySQL engine updates for the free accounts.
Is it possible to update MySQL version on paid subscriptions?
Well, the latest version of MySQL is 8.0, and they skipped version 6 and 7 and 5.0 was released in 2007. So given approximately one major release every decade, it will take another 20-30 years for that version to exist at all.
MariaDB 10.4 does exist, but indeed, we don’t have it yet. But I do see that we’ll need to upgrade it soon, because 10.3 will stop getting updates soon.
As for an update schedule, I can’t give you any. It could happen in a few months from now, it could happen next year. I too really wish there was a schedule for these kinds of things. But iFastNet is responsible for these updates and they don’t share a planning.
Unlike PHP versions, that can be switched pretty much per request, a single server can only have one MySQL version. So to my knowledge, it’s technically impossible for any hosting provider to offer multiple MySQL versions.
But I can tell you that premium hosting runs MySQL 5.7 right now. I don’t know if that’s sufficient because Moodle hasn’t published system requirements for their 4.1 release yet. The latest requirements I can find are for 4.0, which requires either MySQL 5.7 or MariaDB 10.2.29 or higher.
So Moodle 4.0 should work on both free hosting and premium hosting, but Moodle 4.1 may not work on either service (but I don’t know, because no requirements are published).
Certainly I messed with the names and you guessed right the requirement is for MariaDB (which is a weird behavior of the installer, as long as in the config file I required to use MySQL , but from what is stated in moodle support forums, it has to be set on MariaDB even if willing to use MySQLi).
As seen in my screenshot, I was trying to install Moodle 4.1.1+.
Your technical arguments regarding the impossibility to know when MariaDB will be updated at your service are absolutely understandable. So I will give a shot to Moodle 4.0 as per your suggestion.
Will dive deeper on why the installer is requiring to be set on MariaDB whereas is supposed to be fine with MySQL In case I found anything will come back here to share it.
MariaDB is based on MySQL code and still works very similarly. A lot of code can work with MySQL or MariaDB without any code changes. PHP’s handlers are all called “MySQL”, even though they work just as well with MariaDB. Their systems requirements may detect that you’re using a MariaDB server and check the version against that.
I’m guessing that if you point Moodle to a MySQL database, it will detect it as MySQL and check the versions accordingly.
It’s interesting because I always considered MySQL 5.7 and MariaDB 10.3 to be roughly “on par”, as they were released around the same time. But apparently there is some feature difference between them. Or they are just dropping it already because MySQL 5.7 is supported until October and support for MariaDB 10.3 ends in May.
and you guessed right 
the requirement is for MariaDB (which is a weird behavior of the installer, as long as in the config file I required to use MySQL 
, but from what is stated in moodle support forums, it has to be set on MariaDB even if willing to use MySQLi).
In case I found anything will come back here to share it.