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.

Here is a short overview of the new features and changes.

General upgrades:

• New boost-ASIO based server infrastructure
• Overhauling of 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: Our new binary protocol

The Enterprise Edition features:

• SmartGraphs: This is “the” big new feature of our Enterprise Edition. It enables you to shard really huge graphs in a cluster and achieve close to the same performance as on a single instance
• Auditing: fail safe logging of all operations to a central place
• Encryption control: higher level of security thanks to increased control over SSL encryption

Cluster:

• Parallel Intra-Cluster-Communication
• HLC: The Hybrid Logical Clock is used for timestamps in revision strings which is part of the preparation for cluster-wide transactions
• Auto-failover timeouts: you can now configure the timeouts for automatic failovers
• Progress display when relocating shards in the administration frontend
• Stand-Alone Agency: You can now use ArangoDB as a resilient, RAFT-based key/value store as an alternative to e.g. ZooKeeper or etcd. (You’ll surely ask yourself why we created it and we’ll answer this legitimate question with a blog post soon)

Graph Features:

• Vertex-centric indixes for graph traversals in AQL: You can now generate indexes on edge collections which are a combination of the vertex and any suitable attribute

WebUI:

• New Graph Viewer: The new graph viewer got a serious upgrade to handle large amounts of nodes and edges. It also includes our first WebGL implementation. Your feedback is welcome!
• AQL Editor: With the new Query Performance Profiler you can now get infos on the query performance – you can investigate which part of the execution took how long. As a final bonus you can choose between graph, JSON or tabular view of your query results

For the Java World:

We put a lot of effort into our new Java Driver which will only work with ArangoDB 3.1 and onwards. Our Java team completely refactored the driver which is now up to 4x faster than the previous one. The new features include:

• Multi document operations
• Support for VelocyPack
• Support for VelocyStream
• Asynchronous request handling

We hope that you will enjoy the new features and updates that will soon arrive with the official ArangoDB 3.1 release. In the meantime, have fun evaluating the RC2 Community and Enterprise Editions of ArangoDB. We would really appreciate your feedback via our Slack Community channel or directly via our contact form. Your feedback keeps us going.

Have fun playing around with the RC2 of ArangoDB 3.1.