These release notes are replicated for historical purposes only. The release is not supported anymore.
MonetDB 4.12, MonetDB/SQL 2.12, MonetDB/XQuery 0.12, and MonetDB/Five Alpha Release 1 were released on June 23, 2006.
This MonetDB release marks the end of a period where much attention was given to extend the XQuery/Xupdate functionality and efficiency. Although not finished, the many code improvements are valuable to the extended client base. Furthermore, this release marks a feature freeze for XUpdate functionality, claiming enough time to asses its stability and performance before an official release is announced. You may encounter some loose ends and rough edges. A detailed list of changes can be found in the change log of the CVS repository. A summary with the highlights is given below.
Source distribution The MonetDB Version 5 Alpha Release was prepared. It shares the SQL front-end with version 4.
SQL front-end Preliminary support for triggers was added. Now local and global temporary tables are supported. They caused a large rewrite of the session/transaction management. Next to these improvements, many small and large bugs have been fixed. Most notably are fixes to key constraint handling and concurrent transactions.
XQuery All open bugs of XQuery have been addressed, significantly improving its functionality. Serialization, a critical component in any XQuery implementation, has been revamped to obtain a 5-10x speedup in this area. Special attention has been given to parent/ancestor steps. Now they work many times faster inside for-loops (have been loop-lifted) Furthermore, we added XPath extensions for XML standoff annotations (–set standoff=enabled as runtime option to Mserver)
The development of XUpdate was set back by the necessary changes to the underlying MonetDB engine to support BATs with holes in the void sequences. More testing is needed to remove the rough edges.
APIs The PHP library on Linux has been revamped. It is now based on the PostgreSQL PHP library code.
Kernel improvements The BAT recycle cache has been completed. This greatly improve the performance for applications that create/destroy an abundance of small BATs.
The transaction semantics of the kernel has been extended to support a sub-commit of BATs. This prepares the road to combine SQL and XQuery in one Mserver in the future.
Windows port Cross- and native- compilation for 64-bit Windows platforms versions has somewhat be improved, but is not complete yet. The distribution section will shortly contain a 64-bit version for download.
Documentation improvements Some minor changes, but still an area with a potential great return-on-investment.