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AQL Explain Web Interface: ArangoDB Query Optimization
For developers that use the ArangoDB shell arangosh the explain() command and its compact output format is a great resource to check AQL queries. Explain prints the original query, the generated query execution plan, the applied optimizer rules plus the list of indexes that will be used. Jan showed in a blog post how this can look like.
While preparing ArangoDB 2.6 we found some time to add this feature to the Web UI. So now you can check you AQL queries right in the Web-Interface as well. (more…)
Improved System User Authentication: ArangoDB Security Upgrade
ArangoDB can easily be configured to require HTTP authentication for access to the web admin frontend or the REST API. But while Basic Auth works fine for APIs, the user experience in the web admin frontend was decidedly sub-par: browsers would often persist the authentication credentials indefinitely, logging out was made difficult or impossible and switching users was hit-or-miss.
The upcoming ArangoDB 2.6 release introduces cookie-based authentication for the web admin frontend, allowing you to side-step the issue altogether by using the built-in session manager instead of the low-level HTTP API authentication. (more…)
ArangoDB 2.5.4 Release: Improved Features & Stability
This version is deprecated. Download the new version of ArangoDB
ArangoDB 2.5.4 – a maintenance release for the 2.5 branch is available from arangodb.com/download now.
This release fixes some cluster issues, fixes recursive copy under windows and adds a new startup option --log.performance: specifying this option at startup will log performance-related info messages, mainly timings via the regular logging mechanisms.
Foxx Dependencies: Composing More Flexible Foxx Apps
Previously on the ArangoDB blog we saw how we can use the configuration field in manifest.json to make Foxx apps configurable and more re-usable. This is all well and good if we just want to pass in simple values to a Foxx app but sometimes you want to pass in entire Foxx apps. This is where dependencies come in to save the day.
Let’s say you want to use the session storage provided by the ArangoDB sessions app available on the Foxx app store using Foxx exports and imports. Because you hadn’t yet heard of configurations, you simply hard-coded the mount path of your copy of the sessions app in your code: (more…)
LoopBack Connector for ArangoDB: Seamless Integration
ArangoDB can be used as a backend data source for APIs that you compose with the popular open-source LoopBack Node.js framework.
In a recent blog article on StrongLoop, Nicholas Duffy explains how to use his new loopback-connector-arango connector to access ArangoDB:
Getting Started with the Node.js LoopBack Connector for ArangoDB
The tutorial uses the loopback-connector-arango which is available as npm and a demo application which is available from Github. (more…)
ArangoDB JavaScript Driver 3.7: Promises & Performance
ArangoJS, the official ArangoDB JavaScript client, has been updated to version 3.7.0. The new release features significant performance improvements in Node.js and io.js. The dependency on the third-party request module has been replaced with a thin wrapper around node’s own http module, bringing a 3-4x performance improvement for consecutive requests by maintaining a connection pool.
The earlier 3.5 release also added optional support for ES6 promises. While ArangoJS does not provide a promise implementation itself, all asynchronous methods now return promises in JavaScript environments that support them – whether natively (e.g. in io.js or modern browsers) or using a polyfill like es6-promise.
The latest version of ArangoJS is available on NPM and GitHub.
Create an ArangoDB cluster on Amazon Web Services (AWS)
During the last weeks we’ve released our new deployment tool for cloud computing platforms with how-to’s for Google Compute Engine and Digital Ocean support.
Today we show how to deploy an ArangoDB cluster on Amazon Web Services with a single command.
Amazon Web Services (AWS)
To easy-deploy an ArangoDB cluster on AWS you just need to install the official awscli, download a single bash script and watch the tool take care of the rest for you. Your aws account needs permission for creating instances, adding ssh-keypairs and managing security groups.
wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ArangoDB/deployment/publish/AmazonWebServices_ArangoDB_Cluster.sh
chmod 755 AmazonWebServices_ArangoDB_Cluster.sh
Reusable Foxx Apps with Configurations: ArangoDB Development
While the optional configuration field in Foxx manifests had experimental support all the way back to ArangoDB 2.1, the feature was previously undocumented and not well understood. The upcoming ArangoDB 2.6 release officially introduces Foxx configurations, allowing you to make your existing Foxx apps more re-usable and to make better use of third-party apps.
Let’s say your Foxx app needs an API key to make a request to a third-party service using the request module introduced in ArangoDB 2.5. (more…)
IN List Improvements: ArangoDB Query Enhancement
Another performance improvement could be accomplished in the latest devel-branch: The handling of large IN-lists. Those become much faster than in the previous releases. Large IN-lists are normally used when comparing attribute or index values against some big array of lookup values or keys provided by the application.
Read on how this improvement reduces query execution time.