[Announcement] DataStax Node.js Driver v4.7.0 Released

[Bret McGuire]

Greetings all!  Today I'm pleased to announce the release of version 4.7.0 of the DataStax Node.js driver!

This release includes two major additions to the driver.  We'll begin with the updates to the supports Node.js platforms.  We'd fallen behind a bit on this front (to put it mildly; Node.js 8.x has lost some of it's popularity due to being quite old) so this release aims to catch us back up.  So what do we support?  We're working on changing the other drivers to a model of supporting only those releases which are not EOL at time of release and now that change has come to the Node.js driver.  In the case of this driver we're only supporting LTS releases which are not yet EOL.  For 4.7.0 this means we officially support the following releases:

• Node.js 18.x (Hydrogen)
• Node.js 20.x (current)

I'll not briefly here that Node.js 16.x just went EOL a few days before this release.  We don't officially support this runtime but we did include it in all of our testing and in general it performed well.

The second feature added in 4.7.0 is support for the vector type that is coming to Cassandra and already supported in DataStax Astra.  You can find more information on how to read and write vectors in the driver documentation.

The full changelog for this release includes the following new features:

• [NODEJS-653] - Update supported platforms to reflect more modern versions of node.js
  
• [NODEJS-655] - Support vector type
  

We were also able to include a bug fix authored by a community member!

• [PR #391] - Escape column names with quotes (emr)
  

The package is available on npm now!

Thanks!