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ArangoDB 3.2 Beta: RocksDB Storage Engine & Distributed Graph Cluster
We’re excited to release today the beta of ArangoDB 3.2. It’s feature rich, well tested and hopefully plenty of fun for all of you. Keen to take it for a spin? Get ArangoDB 3.2 beta here.
With ArangoDB 3.2, we’re introducing the long-awaited pluggable storage engine and its first new citizen, RocksDB from Facebook
- RocksDB: You can now use as much data in ArangoDB as you can fit on your disk. Plus, you can enjoy performance boosts on writes by having only document-level locks (more info below).
- Pregel: Furthermore, we implemented distributed graph processing with Pregel for discovering hidden patterns, identify communities and perform in-depth analytics of large graph data sets.
- ClusterFoxx: Another important upgrade is what we internally and playfully call the ClusterFoxx. The Foxx management internals have been rewritten from the ground up to make sure multi-coordinator cluster setups always keep their services in sync and new coordinators are fully initialised even when all existing coordinators are unavailable.
- Enterprise: Working with some of our largest customers, we’ve added further security and scalability features to ArangoDB Enterprise like LDAP integration, Encryption at Rest, and the brand new Satellite Collections.
The goal of the whole ArangoDB 3 release cycle has been to scale the multi-model idea to new heights. Getting ‘ready’ for large scale applications is not done overnight and it’s definitely not possible without the help of a strong community. We’d like to invite all of you to lend us a helping hand to make ArangoDB 3.2 the best release ever. Please push this beta to its limits: test it for your use cases and compare the performance of the new features like RocksDB. Let us know on Github any bug that you find. Don’t worry about hurting our feelings: we want to fix any problems.
Join the Beta Bug Hunt Challenge and win a $200 Amazon Gift Card as first prize. You can find more details about this reward program at the end of this post. Read more
RocksDB Integration in ArangoDB: FAQs
The new release of ArangoDB 3.2 is just around the corner and will include some major improvements like distributed graph processing with Pregel or a powerful export tool. But most importantly we integrated Facebook’s RocksDB as the first pluggable storage engine in ArangoDB. With RocksDB you will be able to use as much data in ArangoDB as fits on your disc.
As this is an important change and many questions reached us from the community we wanted to share some answers on the most common questions. Please find them below
Will I be able to go beyond the limit of RAM?
Yes. By defining RocksDB as your storage engine you will be able to work with as much data as fits on your disc.
What is the locking behaviour with RocksDB in ArangoDB?
Alpha3 of ArangoDB 3.2: Support for Distributed Graph Processing
The next alpha release of the upcoming ArangoDB 3.2 is available for testing. You can download and install alpha3 here.
Moving forward
As ArangoDB 3.2 will include several new features and improvements, we realized that the release model that we currently follow has room for improvement. Going forward we will introduce milestone releases with ArangoDB 3.3. For this major release you will see a bit more alphas. You can read detailed info about the new structure model here.
Pregel computing model
In this alpha we introduce support for incremental graph processing algorithms in a single mode server as well as in the cluster. Read more
Introducing milestone release model and why is it better
When developing ArangoDB, we want to share with you new features as early as possible. For example, the pregel implementation that will become part of ArangoDB 3.2 was ready for testing weeks before the release date of the first beta release and the final release of 3.2.
Therefore we decided to create intermediate releases, called alpha releases, which contain new feature as early as they became stable. The benefits for the community and also for our developers team are: Read more
Arangochair – a tool for listening to changes in ArangoDB
The ArangoDB team gave me an opportunity to write a tutorial about arangochair. Arangochair is the first attempt to listen for changes in the database and execute actions like pushing a document to the client or execute an AQL query. Currently it is limited to single nodes.
This tutorial is loosely based on the example at baslr/arangochair-serversendevents-demo
arangochair is a Node.js module hosted on npm which make it fairly easy to install. Just run
npm install arangochair and its installed. Read more
ArangoDB 3.2 Alpha 2: Preview of Upcoming Release
The official ArangoDB 3.2 release is almost around the corner. In the meantime, you can play around and test some of the upcoming new features as they come along. The alpha2 version of the upcoming ArangoDB 3.2 is available for testing and can be downloaded here. If you already have ArangoDB installed, please remember to backup your data and run an upgrade after installing the alpha2 release. Note that this version is not suitable for production usage and is supplied only for testing purposes.
Not getting into too much detail yet – one major change in ArangoDB 3.2 is that it will contain two storage engines. The current storage engine based on memory mapped files and a new one backed by RocksDB. This alpha2 release contains some steps towards this goal, as well as independent improvements and previews of new features. Read more
Arangoexport – a tool for exporting data from ArangoDB
With the release of the initial alpha of ArangoDB version 3.2 we also include the preview of the new export tool arangoexport. Alpha2 of ArangoDB 3.2 can be downloaded here. An export functionality was initially requested by one of our community members to view an ArangoDB graph view the Cytoscape visualizer.
Arangoexport is capable of exporting a graph or certain collections of a graph to xgmml, Cytoscape’s graph format. But arangoexport is not limited to this. It can also generate JSON or JSONL data exports of arbitrary collections. Read more
ArangoDB 3.1: Scaling Solutions, Part II
It’s not that long ago since we released ArangoDB 3.0 in which we introduced our binary storage format VelocyPack, the ArangoDB Agency for a self-managing cluster and the first persistent index by implementing Facebooks RocksDB. With all that we laid the foundation for a solid ground to scale with all three data-models.
With today’s ArangoDB 3.1 release we take things a few steps further and make cluster usage of ArangoDB more performant and convenient. Get ArangoDB 3.1.
General upgrades in 3.1
- Performance boost with our new boost-ASIO server infrastructure
- Performance boost by overhauling the ArangoDB query optimizer
- Improved internal abstraction for storage-engines as a preparation for MVCC and pluggable storage-engines
- VelocyPack over HTTP: Use our binary storage format VelocyPack over HTTP
- VelocyStream: for high performance needs you can now directly stream VelocyPack. This is already implemented in our Java driver (all other drivers maintained by ArangoDB will follow soon).
ArangoDB 3.1 Enterprise: Scaling Graphs
In addition to our community version of ArangoDB 3.1 we are excited to release our first Enterprise Edition today. The Enterprise Editions of ArangoDB focuses on enterprise-scale problems and provides useful features to meet the requirements of enterprise customers. You can download a free evaluation-only version here: Download Enterprise Edition. ArangoDB Enterprise Edition also comes with the Enterprise subscription, including comprehensive support SLA.
This first ArangoDB Enterprise Edition includes three major features:
- SmartGraphs: Scale with graphs to a cluster and stay performant. With SmartGraphs you can use the “smartness” of your application layer to shard your graph efficiently to your machines and let traversals run locally
- Encryption Control: Choose your level of SSL encryption
- Auditing: Keep a detailed log of all the important things that happened in ArangoDB
ArangoDB 3.1 Release Candidate 2: What’s New
We are glad to announce that the second release candidate (RC2) of ArangoDB 3.1 is publicly available. What makes this release particularly special to us is that it also includes an official release candidate of our new Enterprise Edition with a few extra add-ons up its sleeve. The upcoming ArangoDB 3.1 will be a significant release taking effort from the solid base built with ArangoDB 3.0 which introduced our binary storage format VelocyPack, the ArangoDB Agency for a self-managing cluster architecture and the first persistent index based on Facebook’s RocksDB.
RC2 of ArangoDB 3.1 is available for download and evaluation: Community Edition & Enterprise Edition. The documentation for the ArangoDB 3.1 RC 2 can be found here.
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