Beta release 2016-04-21

[Ben Darnell]

A new beta release of CockroachDB is now available, beta-20160421. The download links on the installation instructions have been updated to point to the new release.

What's New in beta-20160421

Apr 21, 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

• UPDATE statements may now set columns which are part of the primary key. #6043
• CHECK constraints can now be defined when creating tables and will be enforced for INSERT statements (but not yet for UPDATE statements). #6044
• The pow() and exp() functions on DECIMAL values no longer lose precision. #6170
• In the cockroach sql shell, the special command \! can now be used to execute a system command and display its output. \| executes a system command and runs its output as a SQL statement. #5961
• Added SHOW CREATE TABLE. #6158
• The RETURNING clause of INSERT statements can now refer to tables by aliases defined with AS. #5903
• The SQL parser now accepts the CASCADE and RESTRICT keywords in the DROP INDEX, TRUNCATE TABLE,ALTER TABLE DROP COLUMN, and ALTER TABLE DROP CONSTRAINT statements. These keywords relate to features we have not yet implemented, so they do nothing, but this change improves compatibility with frameworks that like to send these keywords. #5957

ADMIN UI

• The time scale used for graphs can now be changed. #6145
• Some UI elements now include tooltips with additional explanations. #6006
• A warning is displayed when the cluster is unreachable. #6042
• There are now fewer unnecessary scrollbars. #6018

BUG FIXES

• The rebalancer is now better at distributing ranges across the nodes in a cluster. #6133
• Fixed a major cause of “timestamp in future” errors. #5845
• Fixed several potential panics. #6111 #6143

PERFORMANCE IMPROVEMENTS

• Improved the performance of schema changes while data is being modified. #5996
• The RPC subsystem is now bypassed for requests to the local node. #6021
• Information about completed transactions is now cleaned up more efficiently. #5882
• Fixed a leak of goroutines. #6010
• Reduced memory allocations on the critical path. #6117 #6119 #6140 #6141 #6142

DOC IMPROVEMENTS

• Overview of SQL privileges.
• Summaries and required privileges for all supported SQL statements.
• Reference docs for DROP DATABASE, DROP TABLE, GRANT, RENAME DATABASE, RENAME TABLE, REVOKE, and SHOW INDEX.

CONTRIBUTORS

This release includes 74 merged PRs by 21 authors. We would like to thank the following contributors from the CockroachDB community, especially first-time contributor Andrew NS Yeow.

• Andrew NS Yeow
• Kenji Kaneda
• Kenjiro Nakayama
• Lu Guanqun
• Seif Lotfy