With ArangoDB 2.6 being in beta already, it’s time to look at some features scheduled for 2.7. Today I’ll showcase a few AQL parser improvements that are present in the devel branch already, which will be the foundation for the 2.7 release.

Star operator

The already existing star operator ([*]) is much more flexible in 2.7 than in previous ArangoDB versions. It now allows filtering the values it iterates over, and optional projections.

These features will be demonstrated using the following example member data:

[
  { "name" : "sir alfred", "age" : 60, "likes" : [ "lettuce", "tortoises" ] },
  { "name" : "mozquito", "age" : 15, "likes" : [ "skateboards", "music" ] },
  { "name" : "murphy", "age" : 28, "likes" : [ "juice", "tarts", "cakes" ] },
  { "name" : "helga", "age" : 52, "likes" : [ "home", "garden", "tortoises", "cakes" ] }
]

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Waiting for a git pull to complete over an 8 KiB/s internet connection is boring. So I thought I’d rather use the idle time and quickly write about some performance improvements for certain AQL functions that were recently completed and that will become available with ArangoDB 2.6.

The improvements affect the following AQL functions:

• UNSET(): remove specified attributes from an object/document
• KEEP(): keep only specified attributes of an object/document
• MERGE(): merge the attributes of multiple objects/documents

This blog post shows a few example queries that will benefit from 50 to more than 60 % reductions in query execution times due to the changes done to these functions.

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