Glassfish 4.1 and MariaDB troubles

I'm developing an enterprise application using Netbeans 8.2, Glassfish 4.1 and MariaDB, all of this on Ubuntu 18.04.

However, after all the connections with the DB are established, Glassfish returns this exception:

Internal Exception: java.sql.SQLException: Unknown system variable 'OPTION'

As I've seen, the SET OPTION command was deprecated in MySQL 5.1 and finally removed in MySQL 5.6. MariaDB did the same in their 10.0 version. It seems that Glassfish 4.1 still uses this command.

That leads me to two main solutions:

• Upgrading Glassfish: Glassfish 4.1.1 is very unstable and it doesn't work most of the time. New versions (5.0.x) aren't compatible with Netbeans 8.2.
• Downgrading MariaDB: MariaDB 5.5 isn't available in Ubuntu 18.04 (in their website appears to be 14.04 as its last official version).
• Downgrading Ubuntu: I can downgrade my OS to 14.04, but I hope that could be my last option.

Can someone give me some advice on this? Thanks!

The end of the period where Oracle offered a commercially-supported version of Glassfish, thus reducing it to a pure reference implementation role in our experience marked a notable decline in usability and stability of Glassfish, which is a shame. Payara is an externally maintained and up to date version based on the Glassfish sources but with many improvements. Although they already stopped the evolution of GF4 for non-paying customers, they still do offer a downloadable version. I encourage you to test it, if you like Glassfish you will love Payara :)