Beta Release 2016-06-16

[jessica]

What's new in CockroachDB beta-20160616   June 16, 2016   A new beta release of CockroachDB is now available: beta-20160616. The download links on the installation instructions have been updated to point to the new release.   Deprecation Notice Integers with a leading zero (e.g. 0755) are currently treated as octal. In a future release, leading zeros will be ignored and the numbers will be treated as decimal.#7205 New Features SELECT statements now accept an AS OF SYSTEM TIME clause to read values from the recent past (up to the GC policy set in the zone configuration). #7139 Hexadecimal byte string literals of the form x'f00d' can now be used to create byte strings containing arbitrary characters. #7138 BIGSERIAL and SMALLSERIAL are now supported as aliases for SERIAL. All three types use the same 64-bit value size. #7187 Bug Fixes Fixed a panic in some uses of subqueries. #6994, #7146 ALTER TABLE ADD COLUMN now allows the addition of columns with a uniqueness constraint only when the table is empty. #7094 Improved availability when --raft-tick-interval is increased from its default value. #7086 Improved reporting of errors from single statements run outside transactions.#7080 Invalid octal literals (e.g. 09) no longer crash the server. #7134 When ALTER TABLE fails, it now rolls back dependent items in the correct order.#6789 Aggregate functions like SUM() are no longer allowed in CHECK or DEFAULTexpressions. #7221 Performance Improvements Improved rate limiting of snapshots during rebalancing, reducing memory usage and improving availability. #6878 Splitting a range that has grown beyond the target size is now faster. #7118 Raft elections are now initiated lazily instead of shortly after server startup. #7085 The raft log is now garbage-collected more eagerly. #7125 Increased RocksDB block size, which reduces memory usage. #7219 Doc Updates Docs on the Built-in SQL client now cover pretty-printing to the standard output when executing SQL from the command line. The examples have been improved as well. #373 Docs on the STRING and INT data types now cover hexadecimal-encoded literal format. Also, the STRING docs now cover escape string format. #392 On Functions and Operators, functions are now identified as “built-in” or “aggregate”. Also, whereas functions previously were categorized by return type, they now are categorized mainly by argument type, or in the case of no arguments, return type. #379, #387 On CREATE INDEX, the syntax diagram has been clarified and expanded. #382 Contributors This release includes 80 merged PRs by 19 authors. We would like to thank the following contributors from the CockroachDB community: Kenji Kaneda Paul Steffensen Cheers,  The Cockroach Labs Team