Crate is regularly updated, so we don't normally write a blog post for each release, but our forthcoming 0.55 release is so chock-full of features that we felt it deserved something special. It's not quite ready yet, but here's a few things to look forward to.
Elasticsearch Upgrade
The version of Elasticsearch underpinning some of Crate's functionality has been upgraded to 2.3.3, bringing the improvements to Crate that came with Elasticsearch 2.
Trigonometric Scalar Functions
The six basic trigonometric scalar functions (sin(), cos(), tan(), asin(), acos() & atan()) have been added to Crate to help with length and angle calculations.
Clearer Administration
0.55 improves the user experience of Crate's Admin UI and CLI tools, adding fixes and features to help you manage your cluster better, including adding links to relevant documentation in warning and error notifications. We have split some checks that were node specific but were stored in the sys.checks table into a new sys.node_checks table. The differences between the system and node checks is shown in the Admin UI and Crash.
Speed and Stability Improvements
We have already written in detail about 0.55's speed boost on inserting to replicas, but we have also improved the speed of aggregation queries across nodes with more than one shard.
We removed some backward compatibility with older Crate versions to tidy the codebase and have improved validation rules on primary keys and geo-point data.
Read Only Nodes
You can now configure nodes to allow only SQL statements that result in read operations using a new node.sql.read_only setting.
Settings
Crate plugins may now set values for Crate settings, meaning you could package your custom configuration into a convenient plugin.
The Crate config.yml configuration file can no longer have its file name or location specified, it must always be called config.yml and be located in the config directory.
Great! When's it Out?
Very soon… We want to make sure that 0.55 is well-and-truly ready before release. If you're keen on testing, then find more details here. We would love your feedback.