It is my great pleasure to announce the availability of MonetDB 4.12.0 and its accompanying SQL 2.12.0 and XQuery 0.12.0. This release is the next step in delivering the high performance database system that has been under development for several years now.

Some of the many changes since the 4.10.2 release include: MonetDB/XQuery 0.12.0 (nick-named "Ceres") Various improvments of functionality and performance. Addition of XPath extensions for XML standoff annotations. "Ceres" is a small detour on our trip to "Mars" [1], as update functionality is unfortunately still not robust enough for consumption by the majority. MonetDB/SQL 2.12.0 Many bugfixes. Support for local and global temporary tables. Preliminary support for triggers.

For a complete list of new features and known problems, please see the release notes and errata list, available at: http://monetdb.cwi.nl/Development/Roadmap/Version4.12/index.html

MonetDB/Five Alpha Release 1 ============================

The efforts on the next generation of MonetDB, version Five, are released now. This snapshot of version Five of MonetDB is the very first alpha release of this ongoing development.

Beware: alpha is alpha!

This software is only suitable as sneak-preview into the MonetDB developers team's kitchen! Come and taste some of the many delicious spices we prepare. Unlike the previous generation, Five comes with the MAL language, instead of MIL, which makes it completely incompatible with old MIL scripts. However, the SQL sources work fine with this alpha release. Comparing the performance of both backends via SQL should give you an indication of what our cooks will serve for dinner.

This first alpha "appetiser" release of MonetDB/Five is nick-named "Tomato Soup". Interested users are invited to visit our MonetDB/Five page for more details: http://monetdb.cwi.nl/Development/Five/index.html

Availability ============

The MonetDB family products are supported on i686, x86_64 and ia64 Linux, i686 Solaris 10, ppc and ppc64 Mac OS X 10.4 and i686 Windows XP. Binary distributions are available for Linux and Windows.

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

Acknowledgements ================

Many man-hours were donated by various people to make this release happening. I want to thank al MonetDB developers for their efforts spent into this piece of software. All of our contributors and bug reporters also deserve the credits for the time they put into their contribution.

Further Information ===================

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/

For details about recent changes, migration from earlier versions, and future plans, please visit our roadmap page: http://monetdb.cwi.nl/Development/Roadmap/

Developer CVS Information =========================

With every release some new tags are set and numbers changed. Please check your source trees that you use the right sticky tags on them.

The sources that are put in this release are tagged as follows: MonetDB MonetDB_4-12-0 sql SQL_2-12-0 pathfinder XQuery_0-12-0 The new stable branches are now available through the following tags: MonetDB MonetDB_4-12 sql SQL_2-12 pathfinder XQuery_0-12

To update to the new stable branches use ``cvs update -r <branch tag>`` for the repositories you work with.

Bugs versus Features --------------------

All bugfixes to the code base should be committed to the respective stable branches. All changes made in the stable branches are semi-automanically propagated to the respective development trunks. To ease the task of the propagators, please don't propagate fixes yourself, unless you know how to do it appropriately and have an explicit agreement from one of the propagators.

All new features should be checked in into the respective development trunks.

[1] See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1_Ceres and http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/imagegallery/image_feature_404.html