Announcement ============

TITLE: MonetDB 4.4.0 released

WHAT: MonetDB is an open source high-performance database system developed by CWI, the Institute for Mathematics and Computer Science Research of The Netherlands. It was designed to provide high performance on complex queries against large databases, e.g. combining tables with hundreds of columns and multi-million rows. As such, MonetDB is able to be used in application areas that performance-wise are no-go areas for traditional database technology in a real-time manner. MonetDB has been successfully applied in high performance applications for data mining, OLAP, GIS, XML Query, and text and multimedia retrieval. MonetDB achieves this high performance using innovations at all layers of a DBMS: a storage model based on vertical fragmentation, a modern CPU-tuned vectorized query execution architecture that often gives MonetDB a more than 10-fold raw speed advantage on the same algorithm compared with a typical interpreter-based RDBMS. MonetDB is one of the first database systems to focus its query optimization effort on exploiting CPU caches. MonetDB also features automatic and self-tuning indexes, run-time query optimization, a modular software architecture, etc. In-depth information on the technical innovations in the design and implementation of MonetDB can be found in our digital library.

AUDIENCE: MonetDB is of particular interest to researchers, system developers and students, interested in developing novel query-dominant applications on a flexible database engine. Database application developers find a mature SQL implementation with common interfaces (JDBC,ODBC,php...) to port their software.

PARTNERS: MonetDB 4.4 marks the first official release of the MonetDB product family, developed together with our partners around the world:

- Univ. of Massachusetts at Amherst develops PROXIMITY, an open source relational datamining solution on top of MonetDB. http://kdl.cs.umass.edu/proximity/ - SPSS sells CRM solutions with data mining techogy based on MonetDB. http://www.spss.com/datadistilleries/ - Univ. Konstantz develops PATHFINDER, an open source XQuery processor on top of MonetDB (hosted in the MonetDB SourceForge Repository). http://www.inf.uni-konstanz.de/dbis/research/pathfinder/ Beta release scheduled for Dec 2004.

FUTURE: CWI keeps working on MonetDB and has a roadmap of significant innovations to be introduced in future major relases. These innovations encompass changes with respect to query execution paradigms tuned for modern processors, pluggable optimizers, and novel query languages and storage backends.

LICENSE: MonetDB is covered by the Mozilla license, giving unrestricted access to the code base for inclusion in (commercial) products.

WHERE: The MonetDB homepage : http://monetdb.cwi.nl The MonetDB repository : http://sf.net/project/monetdb The MonetDB technology : http://monetdb.cwi.nl/Research/Articles The MonetDB mailing lists: http://monetdb.cwi.nl/News/MailChannels/index.html

October 01, 2004 The MonetDB development team

Remaining Contents: ===================

- Release Notes - Change Logs - Downloads - CVS update - CVS checkins

Release Notes =============

The first "official" public release "MonetDB-4.4.0" plus "MonetDB-SQL-2.4.0" is available on SourceForge: http://sourceforge.net/projects/monetdb/ .

All users are highly advised (actually "requested" ;-) to use the new release as of now (see below for details concerning download and CVS checkout/update).

Please do not hesitate to ask for support and report bugs or problems, preferably via the bug tracing system at SourceForge (http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?group_id=56967&atid=482468) or via email to monet@cwi.nl; however, please always state clearly, which version of MonetDB/SQL you are using (as the Mserver tells you at startup)!

You are also welcome to subscribe to any (or all) of the MonetDB related mailing lists on SF, cf. http://monetdb.cwi.nl/News/MailChannels/index.html http://sourceforge.net/mail/?group_id=56967

Any support for the now obsolete release candidates "MonetDB-4.4.0_rc2" & "MonetDB-SQL-2.4.0_rc2" (as well as any earlier versions) will stop as of now.

Change Logs ===========

In MonetDB, the major change since the release candidate MonetDB-4.4.0_rc2 are mainly bug fixes.

In SQL, the coverage of SQL-92 & SQL-99 standard, and the functionality of the JDBC & ODBC drivers have been extended.

For details, please check out the (coming) changelogs in the Monetdb-changelogs mailing list on SF: http://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/monetdb-changelogs .

Downloads =========

MonetDB-*-4.4.0-1.i686.rpm -------------------------- These rpm's contain the binary distribution for Linux on i?86 (IA-32) systems. The rpm's were built on a Fedora Core 2 system; however, they should work on other Linux distributions as well (unless there are incompatibilities with dynamically linked system libraries...). While the MonetDB-client-4.4.0-1.i686.rpm can be installed stand-alone, the MonetDB-server-4.4.0-1.i686.rpm requires the matching MonetDB-client-4.4.0-1.i686.rpm to be installed as well. To develop your own add-on modules, you additionally need to install the MonetDB-devel-4.4.0-1.i686.rpm.

MonetDB-SQL*-2.4.0-1.i686.rpm ----------------------------- These rpm's contain the binary distribution for Linux on i?86 (IA-32) systems. The rpm's were built on a Fedora Core 2 system; however, they should work on other Linux distributions as well (unless there are incompatibilities with dynamically linked system libraries...). To get a working MonetDB-SQL server, you need to install the MonetDB-SQL-server-2.4.0-1.i686.rpm (which requires that the MonetDB-server-4.4.0-1.i686.rpm is already installed). MonetDB's "MapiClient" also serves as a textual SQL user interface: simply start it with "MapiClient --language=sql". The MonetDB-SQL-client-2.4.0-1.i686.rpm contains (preliminary) ODBC & JDBC support for MonetDB-SQL. The MonetDB-SQL-devel-2.4.0-1.i696.rpm contains header files for further development.

MonetDB-4.4.0.tar.gz -------------------- This is a gzip'ed tar file containing the source code of MonetDB; read HowToStart or HowToStart-Win32.txt for build instructions.

MonetDB-SQL-2.4.0.tar.gz ---------------------------- This is a gzip'ed tar file containing the source code of MonetDB/SQL; read HowToStart-SQL or HowToStart-SQL-Win32.txt for build instructions.

MonetDB_JDBC-1.0.jar -------------------- Contains the MonetDB JDBC drive & client for MonetDB. See http://monetdb.cwi.nl/TechDocs/APIs/JDBC/index.html for details.

Mknife-1.4.0.jar ---------------- Mknife is a 'Swiss army knife' GUI to ease the interaction with a running MonetDB server. See http://monetdb.cwi.nl/GetGoing/Usage/Mknife/ for details.

MonetDB-Installer-4.4.0.zip --------------------------- This zip file contains a file Setup.exe which is the Windows installer. Extract the zip file somewhere, and start Setup.exe to install MonetDB. The installer also contains the SQL frontend which is automatically installed. Once installed, you can find shortcuts to the SQL server and SQL client in the Start menu. "MonetDB-Installer-4.3.18.zip" is built with Visual Studio .NET 2003, and hence requires the .NET runtime environment to be installed, too.

(In case you need binary installers for other systems/platform, please feel free to contact us.)

CVS update ==========

If you are already using the release branches "MonetDB_4-4-0" and "SQL_2-4-0" from CVS, simply run "cvs update -dP" to update your code to this new release version.

If you are already using a CVS version of MonetDB/MonetDB-SQL, you can run either "cvs update -dP -rMonetDB_4-4-0_release" "cvs update -dP -rSQL_2-4-0_release" to get this very release, or "cvs update -dP -rMonetDB_4-4-0" "cvs update -dP -rSQL_2-4-0" to get the most recent version in the release branch. The difference is, that via the first option, you are "stuck" with this very release, i.e., future "cvs update" (without "-r..." or "-A") will not change your checked-out version; via the second option, however, future "cvs update" will get you again the latest version in the release branch.

CVS checkins ============

All bug fixes (and only these!) on MonetDB and/or SQL are bound to go to the new release branches ("MonetDB_4-4-0"/"SQL_2-4-0"), first. On a regular basis, these bug-fixes will be propagated back to the respective main trunk.

All new features are bound to go to the main trunks (and only there!).

As usually, any (constructive;-) comments and feedback are more than welcome!

Enjoy!

The MonetDB development team