Of course, every release has criteria that need to be met. In the case with NuoDB 2.0.4 the criteria were simple, and rooted firmly in product quality and stability. Sure, we may say it often and you might consider it a given, but quality was truly our sole focus for this release. We dropped nearly everything from our queue that didn’t have a direct and verifiable impact on it. This investment in quality has a cost, one that we accept and embrace, because it has a lasting longer term value for NuoDB and for you. We’ll consider the criteria met once you’ve downloaded and verified it for yourself in 2.0.4.
Let’s take a look at a few top items* to know about in 2.0.4, front and center (*see more depth in the Release Notes for 2.0.4):
- Quality, and lots of it. No, really, there are over 300 product updates.
- We identified a big “gotcha” in the form of an OOM killer and offered a strong warning. See our Techblog on Linux Transparent Huge Pages for a solid write-up.
- Lots of SQL fixes and improvements, including a complete rebuild of our SQL name resolution phase
- Significant query optimizer changes that make the generation of query plans substantially more efficient and accurate
- Performance with journaling enabled has been improved across all of our supported platforms.
- The preview Automation Console domain dashboard adds some flexibility and customization.
- Our .NET driver now has support for Entity Framework 6.
- Data loading in the Migrator has been optimized and significantly improved.
- Lots of Explorer enhancements and bug-fixes: including Scalability improvements, DDL script generation, Right-click context menus, and much more.
I’ve already written the word “quality” several times here, and I think I have a few more to go. To close, I wanted to share how our heavy push on quality in this release cycle reminded us of a few things.
- Customers will push the product in ways that we don’t always expect or anticipate; we are continually working to ensure that we meet or exceed their expectations.
- Testing for stability, performance, and scalability is paramount to the success of this product; we’re constantly adding test suites and getting them to pass to provide us the necessary confidence in our product.
- We eat our own dogfood, as NuoDB is used throughout our company; we use our experiences from using NuoDB as a customer to improve the product and our processes.
Once you download NuoDB 2.0.4, we’d love to hear about your project(s) and experiences with our product. We strongly encourage you to get active in the Community Forum, where you’ll find many others talking about their experiences and asking great questions. Go get 2.0.4 and we’ll see you in the forum!