Dear all,

we're pround to annonce the new release of our open source high-performance database system family: MonetDB 4.10 MonetDB/SQL 2.10 MonetDB/XQuery 0.10 or simply nick-named "Earth".

The new release is avialable for download from http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=56967 .

The MonetDB release 4.10 ("Earth") marks the end of a period where much attention was given to improving the performance of simple SQL applications. These improvements came from careful analysis of student programs and participating in the "c't" Magazine's database contest featuring the DVDstore benchmark.

It led to re-consideration of MAPI -- the communication protocol -- aiming for less overhead and complex structures to be parsed. To facilitate this, JDBC has been largely rewritten at core level to streamline the communication flow even more. Not only JDBC has benefited from the changes made, all MAPI driven communication has been sped up.

A second Perl library has been prepared, which more directly uses the MAPI library. It has been registered at the official Perl archive for distribution (CPAN). ODBC has been upgraded to support server side prepared statements like JDBC. More meta-data is now available for columns in JDBC.

MonetDB/SQL has been extended with SQL:03's sequences support. This allows for identity columns, serials (PostgreSQL) or auto_increments (MySQL) in MonetDB. A complete rewrite of the catalog and transaction handling removed the overhead encountered in small interactions. The SQL transaction scheme is based on three BATs (stable,inserts,deletes) which are merged at the end of a transaction.

MonetDB/XQuery performance has been significantly improved thanks to the introduction of an element index and other optimizations both in the compiler and the server. Further, support for a number of new built-in functions (e.g. subsequence, replace, match) has been added and MonetDB/XQuery now provides (limited) support for XQuery modules. The latter allows defining 'prepared queries' by using functions defined in modules, which results in better response times especially for small queries. See http://monetdb.cwi.nl/XQuery/Documentation/Language/Modules/index.html for more details.

The MonetDB software base has been split to ease source distribution. The tools to prepare the source compilation (Mx), source code generators (MEL, Burg) and makefile generators (autogen) are assembled in the buildtools package. They are not needed to recompile the distributed source code.

In the kernel area we have added the 'constant' module. It provides functions to work with BATs whose tail consist of a constant value.

During this period we have solved numerous bugs reported by our users. In addition we organized 3 bug testing days to encapsulate the problems reported into scripts that became part of our nightly testing scheme.

Several smaller performance improvements have been made to the inner core of the server. One semantic error has been the cause of confusion. BATs with signature [void,void] are now allowed. A detailed description of the changes will follow soon.

Lack of manpower, expiring access to external machines, ceasing system maintenance and decrepit hardware forced us to stop nightly testing on IBM AIX, SGI IRIX and Sun Solaris. Thus, all active support for these (aging) platforms had to be suspended, too, but can easily be revived on request, once we (re-)gain access to such systems. Higher on our wishlist are more modern systems, especially 64-bit Windows and 64-bit Mac OS X. We welcome any donation in this area: access to respective systems, hardware, and/or (especially in case of the pending 64-bit Windows port of MonetDB) development-expertise and -time.

The next release of MonetDB version 4 is scheduled for March 2006. By that time we also plan to release the alpha version of the next generation of MonetDB, version 5.

Further information about MonetDB, MonetDB/SQL and MonetDB/XQuery is available on our web site at http://monetdb.cwi.nl/ http://monetdb.cwi.nl/SQL/ http://monetdb.cwi.nl/XQuery/ respectively. See http://monetdb.cwi.nl/Development/Roadmap/ http://monetdb.cwi.nl/XQuery/Overview/Roadmap/ for details about recent changes, migration from earlier versions, and future plans.

Regards, The MonetDB Development Team

ps: For questions, comments, etc. please use the respective mailing lists (cf., http://monetdb.cwi.nl/News/MailChannels/ ; prefered), or send an email to monet@cwi.nl.