Beta release 2016-04-28

[Ben Darnell]

A new beta release of CockroachDB is now available, beta-20160428. The download links on the installation instructions have been updated to point to the new release.

What's New in beta-20160428

Apr 28, 2016

BACKWARDS-INCOMPATIBLE CHANGES

• Time zone offsets are no longer shown when querying columns of type TIMESTAMP; the new typeTIMESTAMP WITH TIME ZONE should be used instead. This is more consistent with other databases. #6165

NEW FEATURES

• INTERVAL values accept two new formats: ISO8601 (P2H30M) and the PostgreSQL format (2 hours 30 minutes) in addition to the existing Go style (2h30m). #6216
• Tuples can now be compared in SQL expressions. #6217
• The server now implements the systemd NOTIFY_SOCKET protocol. #6268
• The new flag cockroach start --background can be used to start a server in the background. This is better than appending & because the process doesn’t return until it is ready to receive traffic. #6268

BUG FIXES

• The SQL shell can once again be suspended with ctrl-z. #6171
• Fixed an error in the SQL shell when the history file contains empty lines. #6192
• The --store and --key-size command-line flags are no longer marked as required. #6229
• The command line interface is better about printing errors to stderr, not just the log file. #6258
• The INFO log file is now created in the correct default location (cockroach-data/logs) instead of$TMPDIR. #6265
• Fixed errors that could be introduced by updating tables while a schema change is in progress. #6160
• Fixed several potential panics. #6187, #6235, #6242

PERFORMANCE IMPROVEMENTS

• Raft processing is no longer blocked while generating a snapshot for a new replica. #6253

CONTRIBUTORS

This release includes 89 merged PRs by 19 authors. We would like to thank the following contributors from the CockroachDB community, especially first-time contributor Karl Southern.

• Karl Southern
• Kenjiro Nakayama