Dear Developers, Enclosed you find the draft cover letter for the upcoming MonetDB release. Please provide any comments that from your perspective are relevant to mention. In preparing the distribution content we have finally decided not to include anything of the Xupdate functionality, SOAP, or other XML modules. The primary reason is that implementation and validation of these components have not reached a point were we are confident of their stability. These issues will be moved forward to the next release planned for March 2006 when the system will be presented at EDBT. Nevertheless, we can be proud of the progress made. Especially interaction with the server using a large number of small SQL update queries has been boosted to the point where we are in the same arena as MySQL and PostgreSQL using JDBC connectivity. The code freeze date is Friday, Jan 13 2006. We plan to release MonetDB v4.10 on Tuesday, Jan 24 2006. Regards, The MonetDB Development Team ------------------- Cover release 4.10 ---------- The MonetDB release 4.10 marks the end of a period where much attention was given to improving the performance of simple SQL applications. These improvements came from careful analysis of student programs and participating in the "c't" Magazine's database contest featuring the DVDstore benchmark. It led to re-consideration of MAPI -- the communication protocol -- aiming for less overhead and complex structures to be parsed. To facilitate this, JDBC has been largely be rewritten at core level to streamline the communication flow even more. Not only JDBC has benefited from the changes made, all MAPI driven communication has been sped up. A second Perl library has been prepared, which more directly uses the MAPI library. It has been registered at the official Perl archive for distribution (ICAN). ODBC has been upgraded to support server side prepared statements like JDBC. More meta-data is now available for columns in JDBC. MonetDB/SQL has been extended with SQL:03's sequences support. This allows for identity columns, serials (PostgreSQL) or auto_increments (MySQL) in MonetDB. A complete rewrite of the catalog and transaction handling removed the overhead encountered in small interactions. The SQL transaction scheme is based on three BATs (stable,inserts,deletes) which are merged at the end of a transaction. MonetDB/XQuery performance has been boosted using query/result caching and a rewrite of the code to manage the internal representation of MIL programs. Further, MonetDB/XQuery no also supports XQuery module definitions. XQuery is currently actively used in large scale applications and is stable. The MonetDB software base has been split to ease source distribution. The tools to prepare the source compilation (Mx), source code generators (MEL, Burg) and makefile generators (autogen) are assembled in the buildtools package. They are not needed to recompile source code distributed. ! TODO: ! Actually make the latter work. ! For now also the source distributions (still) require the buildtools package. In the kernel area we have added the 'constant' module. It provides functions to work with BATs whose tail consist of a constant value. During this period we have solved numerous bugs reported by our users. In addition we organized 3 bug testing days to encapsulate the problems reported into scripts that became part of our nightly testing scheme. Several smaller performance improvements have been made to the inner core of the server. One semantic error has been the cause of confusion. Bats with signature [void,void] are now allowed. A final clean-up of the respective semantic is currently being implemented; a detailed description of the changes will follow soon. Lack of manpower, expiring access to external machines, ceasing system maintenance and decrepit hardware forced us to stop nightly testing on IBM AIX, SGI IRIX and Sun Solaris. Thus, all active support for these (aging) platforms had to be suspended, too, but could easily be revived on request, once we (re-)gain access to such systems. Higher on our wishlist are more modern systems, especially 64-bit Windows and 64-bit Mac OS X. We welcome any donation in this area: access to respective systems, hardware, and/or (especially in case of the pending 64-bit Windows port of MonetDB) development-expertise and -time. The next release of MonetDB version 4 is scheduled for March 2006. By that time we also plan to release the alpha version of the next generation of MonetDB, version 5. Regards, The MonetDB Development Team -- | Dr. Stefan Manegold | mailto:Stefan.Manegold@cwi.nl | | CWI, P.O.Box 94079 | http://www.cwi.nl/~manegold/ | | 1090 GB Amsterdam | Tel.: +31 (20) 592-4212 | | The Netherlands | Fax : +31 (20) 592-4312 |