Beta release 2016-05-05

[jes...@cockroachlabs.com]

What's new in CockroachDB beta-20160505   May 5, 2016   Welcome to our inaugural Beta Release Note emails. In case you miss a release, we archive all our notes here on our docs site.   A new beta release of CockroachDB is now available: beta-20160505. The download links on the installation instructions have been updated to point to the new release.     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 instead 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 Users can now click Chat with Developers in the lower right corner of any docs page to access the public CockroachDB Gitter channel without leaving the site. #248 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     Thanks, The Cockroach Labs Team