Guide to upgrade mariadb to v12 in virtualmin

jimr1 · August 21, 2025, 5:31am

to quote a Virtualmin staff member

There’s no reason to.

Your OS vendor (Ubuntu or whatever) will maintain the version you have throughout the life of the distribution, including backporting security patches, if needed, which is great for longterm stability and compatibility. When you upgrade across major versions of MariaDB, MySQL, or Postgresql, it is often best practice to perform a dump and restore (though check the upgrade docs for your specific versions of your specific database), which is a time-consuming process that requires downtime. Those are best planned as part of an OS upgrade for the vast majority of users. There may be other changes that require code changes in your applications, again check the upgrade docs for your specific versions of your specific database.

If you install a different version of Mariadb from the one provided by your distro, you do not get the long-term update assurance, and you’re then on the hook to always upgrade from that new source…meaning you may be signing up for more frequent dump/restore cycles (Mariadb doesn’t change major versions extremely often, and they maintain a couple of major versions via a long term support model, so it’s not a super big deal in this case, but it can happen).