January 2007

MonetDB 4.16, MonetDB/SQL 2.16, MonetDB/XQuery 0.16, MonetDB 5.0.0_beta1, MonetDB 5.0.0_beta1/SQL 2.16.

A bug fix release was made available on Feb 26, 2007. See the notes at the end of this paper.

The Venus release represents a major shift in functionality. First, we released the long awaited for XQuery Update Facility. As far as we know, it is the first W3C compliant XUF implementation available and provides full transaction control.

The next step was the

big bang

change in the packaging of the server layer. The successor, MonetDB Version 5 is moved to SourceForge. The MonetDB/SQL software line is available with both back-ends, but for Version 4 it is the final release. Finally, redesign over the website has lead to a better navigational structure and much more information on the product lines. A detailed list of changes can be found in the source code CVS change logs. A summary with the highlights is given below.

Source distribution MonetDB Version 5.0.0_beta1 was prepared and shipped to SourceForge.

SQL front-end The SQL functionality has been extended to support SQL triggers and fully functional Persistent Stored Modules. This extension was inspired by our ongoing port of the Skyserver application. Dependencies between SQL objects are stored now and dropping objects respect the ‘strict’ object dependency rule. Loading large tables have been significantly improved and the heuristic query optimizer covers a much larger space.

XQuery This release contains an implementation of XUF (XQuery Update Facility) based on the W3C working draft. In addition, the release adds a number of significant other features to XQuery:

• “multi-document collections” allow much more efficient management of XML databases that consist of many (small) documents, a weakpoint of the previous releases.
• XRPC: distributed query processing between multiple MonetDB servers; also useful as SOAP API.
• document management interface: the XML document database can now be controlled fully from XQuery (no MIL needed anymore).
• improvements in query performance.

Kernel improvements The memory mapped file functionality has been signficantly changed to accomodate efficient processing of XQuery/XUF.

Documentation The revamped website became alive.

Bugfix release Feb 26,2007

New versions of all components of the MonetDB suite are released.

1. MonetDB/XQuery The handling of updates was incomplete. Several memory mapping and concurrency problems have been fixed. Moreover, empty pages that resulted from deletion of nodes are now properly handed back to the system for reuse.
2. MonetDB/XRPC Security and concurrency handling has been improved.
3. MonetDB/SQL Foreign key constraint checking fixed; View in view dependencies bug fixed; Resolved crashes caused by large views; Prepared statements with more than 30 arguments now work.
4. MonetDB/API Haskell and TCL libraries were broken and have been removed; Perl and Python libraries were broken and have been fixed. The current version of the protocol is not compatible with the previous version.
5. Bugs fixed: [ 1579510 ] XQ: update error for “(1,2)/.” [ 1590523 ] XQ: substring-after [ 1636828 ] fork() behaves strangely [ 1637867 ] XQ: seqcast int? to numeric unsupported [ 1639108 ] mserver crashes on delete query [ 1640248 ] PF: ~500 tests randomly fail on Solaris x86 [ 1644245 ] M5 & SQL5: various tests hang/timeout on Darwin [ 1648303 ] database dump does not save/restore auto-increment sequences [ 1650469 ] SQL: Armada sinks MonetDB ships [ 1651567 ] yet another delete bug, foreign key related [ 1651599 ] caching of inserts causes extreme memory consumption [ 1655818 ] SQL:Error inserting float in numeric column using JDBC [ 1655857 ] XQ: call to builtin function crashes XRPC client [ 1659889 ] SQL: sequence not restored properly [ 1644610 ] Conflict between normal query and XRPC query (and many more that hadn’t been reported)