Release Notes

FoundationDB Alpha 5

Language support

• FoundationDB now supports Ruby

• FoundationDB now supports Node.js

• FoundationDB now supports Java and other JVM languages.

Features

• A new backup system allows scheduled backups of a snapshot of the FoundationDB database to an external filesystem.

• Integrated HTML documentation

• Snapshot reads allow API clients to selectively relax FoundationDB’s strong isolation guarantee. Appropriate use can of them can reduce Conflict ranges but makes reasoning about concurrency harder.

• Streaming modes allow API clients to adjust how FoundationDB transfers data for range reads for improved performance.

• Client APIs automatically detect the appropriate network interface (local address) when connecting to a cluster, and will look for a Default cluster file.

Compatibility

• Tuples encoded with prior alpha versions are incompatible with the tuple layer in Alpha 5.

• Databases created with Alpha 4 will be compatible. (See Upgrading from older versions for upgrade instructions)

• Databases created before Alpha 4 will be incompatible. (See Upgrading from older versions for details)

Changes to all APIs

• The API version has been updated to 14.

• Snapshot reads (see Features, above).

• Streaming modes (see Features, above).

• Automatic network interface detection (see Features, above).

• The tuple layer supports unicode strings (encoded as UTF-8), has a more compact encoding, and is not compatible with data from prior versions.

• Reversed range reads are now exposed through a separate parameter rather than via a negative limit.

• Extensible options are now exposed at the network, cluster, database and transaction levels. The parameters to fdb_setup_network() and fdb.init() have been replaced by network options.

• Option enumerations are available in a machine-readable format for the benefit of third-party language binding developers.

Python API changes

• fdb.open() can be called with no parameters to use the Default cluster file.

• Waiting on a Future object has changed from .get() to .wait()

• Reversed range reads can by specified by passing a slice object with a -1 step.

• The convenience read methods on fdb.Database are now transactional.

C API changes

• Byte limits exposed in fdb_transaction_get_range(). These are not currently exposed by any of the higher level clients (and usually streaming modes should be preferred).

• fdb_future_get_keyvalue_array() returns an explicit flag indicating whether there is more data in the range beyond the limits passed to fdb_transaction_get_range().

• fdb_transaction_get_range_selector has been eliminated - fdb_transaction_get_range() always takes key selectors.