beta-20170309.md

title	toc	summary
What's New in beta-20170309	false	Additions and changes in CockroachDB version beta-20170309.

Mar 9, 2017

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Binaries

Mac Linux

General Changes

• CockroachDB now uses Go 1.8. #13673
• CockroachDB now uses RocksDB 5.1.4. #13831

SQL Language Changes

• Table names are now released as soon as the DROP TABLE statement executes, instead of being held until the asynchronous cleanup finishes. #13908
• Most write statements now accept a RETURNING NOTHING clause to indicate that the query should not return a result (not even the number of rows affected). This will be used in the future to enable optimizations. #13802
• PostgreSQL-style duration formats are now parsed case-insensitively. #13748
• Tables with no columns are now handled correctly in the network protocol. #13765
• COPY no longer requires the input data to end in a newline. #13858
• SHOW CONSTRAINTS no longer includes constraints involving hidden columns. #13870
• It is no longer possible to drop system tables. #13911
• The DESC modifier can now be applied to columns in a PRIMARY KEY or UNIQUE clause during table creation. #13924

Command-Line Interface Changes

• The cockroach dump command now takes an --as-of flag, which can be used to make a backup as of a particular time.
• When starting a node, the details printed to stdout are now written to the node's INFO log as well. Also, these details now include node attributes and locality. #1143, #1144

Bug Fixes

• Fixed (again) a bug in error handling that could causes ranges to get stuck if an error occurred during a rebalance. #13763
• Work around a bug that could cause GRPC connections to get stuck in a broken state. #13822
• Panic stack traces are now written to the INFO log file by default instead of to stderr. #13890

Performance Improvements

• Improved performance in high-contention scenarios by introducing a queue to wait for conflicting transactions to finish. This also reduces the likelihood of transaction restarts due to write/write conflicts. #13501
• A new lease implementation is now used for most ranges, reducing the number of writes that must be done just to maintain a lease. #13826
• Reduced the occurrence of AmbiguousResultError by waiting for pending RPCs to complete before returning. #13800
• Changed some mutexes to RWMutexes. Removed some instrumentation of mutex timing. #13697
• cockroach dump now works in larger batches. #13812
• Failed snapshots no longer disrupt regular raft messages. #13816
• Increased flow control parameters for GRPC connections, improving performance on high-latency links. #13840
• Increased limits on in-flight raft messages. #13862
• Range leases are now proactively transferred away from draining nodes. #13792
• Avoid sending redundant PushTxn calls in intent resolution. #13955

Doc Updates

• Added an FAQ on auto-generating unique IDs in CockroachDB. #1126
• Expanded guidance on using a SQL table as an alternative to direct key-value access. #1122
• Added details about using the BIT type to constrain integers based on their corresponding binary values. #1116
• Added details about building a binary that excludes enterprise functionality covered by the CockroachDB Community License (CCL). #1130

Contributors

This release includes 124 merged PRs by 21 authors. We would like to thank first-time contributor Dmitry Vorobev from the CockroachDB community.