November Recap: ArangoDB Updates & Highlights

November 2014 was a month where our staff (and the cute ArangoDB Foxx) collected lot’s of miles by visiting conferences, meetups and inspiring people in Europe, Africa, the US and Canada. If you missed a talk, there are plenty of slideshares / recordings available.

Release 2.3

Everyone who was not on a plane worked on ArangoDB 2.3 – our major release with a re-written query optimizer that optimizes execution plans, added/improved AQL functions and several performance improvements (@see Query Optimizer Tour by Jan). You can download ArangoDB 2.3.1 and start optimizing.

Frank added a docker file, so you might start shipping ArangoDB in a docker container as well.

Extensibility Framework Foxx

Our JavaScript extensibility framework Foxx (@see this new 2:45min ArangoDB Foxx intro by Lucas) also benefits from our 2.3 release, adding job queues and session handling for Foxx apps, plus 3 bundled apps for user management, session and authentication.

With a blog post series started last week on Building Hypermedia APIs Lucas introduces the concepts of hypermedia in JSON. The second post will follow later today, explaining how to design a complete web API with a state-chart / state-machine. Finaly, the third post will describe how you can use the new FoxxGenerator (upcoming 2.4 release) to build your API.

Can’t wait? Then use our newly introduced ArangoDB technical previews to get your hands on our latest features. The 2.4.1 technical preview can be used to test the FoxxGenerator feature.

ArangoDB Driver Support

We also worked on a new Java Driver which is fully documented and comes with an additional blog post on Graph handling with the Java Driver.

Great effort from the community leads to several more driver updates, improved documentation and ArangoDB 2.3 support. Have a look at the drivers page to see if your favorite programming language is one of the 16 supported.

Cookbook – Recipes to make with ArangoDB

We have introduced an ArangoDB Cookbook as a developers source that provides easy to use recipes for common tasks / problems to solve in or with ArangoDB. Recipes explain how-to start a docker container with ArangoDB, Fulldepth graph traversals or how to write your first Foxx app.

Please add your recipes via Github to extend this resource for relevant hands-on solutions!

Blog Posts

Several blog posts you might have missed last month:

• Building Hypermedia APIs – Links and Forms in JSON
• Modeling Data in MongoDB vs ArangoDB
• Docker Integration
• A brief introduction to the PREGEL module for large-scale graph processing.
• How to use the ArangoDB Java Driver in batch and asynchronous mode
• ArangoDB Java Driver and Graphs – Part 1
• ArangoDB Java Driver and Graphs – Part 2
• The new ArangoDB Java Driver
• A Tour Around the New AQL Query Optimizer
• Improved Non-unique Hash Indexes in 2.3

#FoxxOnTour

This month we didn’t only work on several releases, we also flew around the world visiting many conferences, user groups and awesome people, guarded by our lovely Foxx. Places we’ve been in November:

• Barcelona at the NoSQL Matters
• Casablanca at the jmaghreb
• New York at the Java Meetup Group, the SQL NYC, The NoSQL & NewSQL Database Meetup and the New York PHP Meetup
• Boston at the Node.js in the wild and the Boston Software Engineers
• Madrid at the Big Data Spain
• Toronto at the Full Stack Toronto
• Posen at the Polyconf

And here are some pictures of our Foxx having fun at different places all around the world, tagged with #FoxxOnTour: