Beta release 2016-05-12

[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-20160512

May 12, 2016

UPGRADE PROCEDURE

• This release cannot be run concurrently with older beta releases. Please stop all nodes running older releases before restarting any node with this version.

NEW FEATURES

• The INSERT statement now accepts an ON CONFLICT clause, for a more flexible alternative to UPSERT.#6591
• The new EXPLAIN (TYPES) subcommand prints information about the types of expressions in a statement.#6482
• Added the aggregate functions BOOL_AND() and BOOL_OR(). #6535
• The aggregate functions SUM(INT) and AVG(INT) now return DECIMAL instead of INT and FLOATrespectively. #6532
• The new command-line flag --raft-tick-interval allows the raft heartbeat frequency to be changed in high-latency deployments. #6615
• TIMESTAMP values can now be cast to type STRING. #6605
• The CREATE DATABASE statement now accepts an ENCODING option for compatibility with PostgreSQL, although UTF8 is the only supported encoding. #6614

BUG FIXES

• Fixed a bug when a single INSERT statement inserts multiple values for the same primary key. #6564
• Fixed an inconsistency that could occur when a transaction in SNAPSHOT isolation used the internalDeleteRange operation. #6548
• Fixed an integer underflow that could result in log messages liketransport: http2Server received 4294965918-bytes. #6567
• Long-running transactions are no longer allowed to exceed their table descriptor lease. #6418
• Subtracting an INTERVAL from a TIMESTAMP WITH TIME ZONE returns a TIMESTAMP WITH TIME ZONEinstead of one without a time zone. #6540
• Improved type checking of comparisons involving tuples. #6517
• CREATE TABLE, ALTER TABLE, and DROP INDEX now do more validation of their arguments. #6492

PERFORMANCE IMPROVMENTS

• Improved tracking of keys modified during a transaction, improving performance of bulk inserts. #6611
• Schema changes can now continue past transient errors. #6552

DOC UPDATES

• The new Tech Talks page links to recordings and slides from talks by CockroachDB founders and engineers.
• Docs for the built-in SQL client now demonstrate various ways to execute SQL statements from the command line and run external commands from the interactive shell.
• Data type docs now provide details about storage size.
• Although it’s not possible to access CockroachDB’s key-value store directly, the FAQ now suggests a SQL alternative.
• Replication recommendations now address cross-datacenter scenarios.

CONTRIBUTORS

This release includes 87 merged PRs by 18 authors. We would like to thank the following contributor from the CockroachDB community:

• Kenji Kaneda