What's New in beta-20160505

May 5, 2016

Get future release notes emailed to you:

Thanks!

Binaries

New Features

• New SQL command UPSERT is available. This is syntactically similar to INSERT but will update the row with the supplied columns if there is a conflicting row for the primary key. #6456
• The SQL type system has been overhauled, reducing the number of explicit casts required. RFC
• Tuples are now considered for index selection, so SELECT * FROM t WHERE (a, b) > ($1, $2) can use an index defined on (a, b). #6332

Performance improvements

• Bulk inserts to previously-empty table spans are now faster. #6375, #6414
• Ranges that have grown above the target size are now split before being rebalanced, reducing memory usage. #6447
• Reduced rapid memory growth during partitions. #6448
• ALTER TABLE now performs backfill operations in chunks. #6056
• DROP TABLE now uses the schema change mechanism intead of synchronously deleting all data. #6336
• Scanning over records that have only one MVCC version is faster. #6351
• The command queue now uses coarse-grained spans until a conflict has occurred. #6412
• When a replica is rebalanced from one node to another, the old node no longer triggers unnecessary Raft elections. #6423

Production

• Servers now attempt to drain more gracefully when restarted. #6313
• Metrics on lease requests are now available internally. #5596
• The RocksDB cache will no longer use all available memory if cgroups reports a limit higher than physical memory. #6379

Bug Fixes

• The range descriptor cache is now invalidated correctly, fixing a bug in which requests could be retried repeatedly on the wrong node. #6425
• Fixed a bug with some queries using aggregate functions like MIN() and MAX(). #6380
• Tuple comparisons now work correctly when one tuple contains NULL. #6370

Doc Updates

• Community-supported docs and configuration files for running CockroachDB inside a single VirtualBox virtual machine. #263
• Docs on using environment variables as default values for command-line flags. #235
• Docs on using the version and node commands.

Contributors

This release includes 66 merged PRs by 18 authors. We would like to thank the following contributors from the CockroachDB community, especially first-time contributor Paul Steffensen.

• Bogdan Batog
• il9ue
• Kenji Kaneda
• Paul Steffensen