In brief: CrateDB Enterprise can now be run for free for cluster up to three nodes, the Community Edition needs to be built by users themselves. Besides this substantial change, there are more Window Functions, SQL Features, Postgres Compatibility, and Monitoring and Administration features.
DOWNLOAD NOW and also check our release notes.
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In 3.2 we changed the way users can test CrateDB including the enterprise features by introducing a 30 day limit. With release 3.3, we increased the possibility to test and use enterprise features by not requiring a license for CrateDB clusters for up to three nodes at all. In the future we won’t ship a packaged community edition, a tarball needs to be built by users on their own.
Newly created licenses will always expire at a defined date and contain a specific max. amount of nodes per cluster.
We are well aware of the reduced convenience for users using the Community Edition. We have always been close to our community and thought we could introduce this gentle license handling that we had before. Looking at the numbers it became clear we’d need to be stricter. Still, we see ourselves as a 100 % Open Source company. See the blog post by our CTO regarding his thoughts.
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First real window functions
Window functions were introduced in our last minor release by making all existing aggregation functions available as window functions. We introduced the first real window functions by implementing first_value, last_value and nth_value as well as row_number.
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Additional SQL Features and PostgreSQL Compatibility
With our move to the PostgreSQL Wire Protocol we wanted to enable tools implementing PostgreSQL connectivity to work with CrateDB out of the box. This is already the case for a lot of tools although we are not supporting all PostgreSQL features and syntax yet. From time to time existing tools change and new tools appear in our users’ requirements and require us to move a step further in the compatibility. Most of the time we just need to add postgres specific tables and functions. With 3.3, CrateDB will work better with the PostgreSQL connector of Grafana and Jaspersoft.
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Monitoring and Administration
Being able to operate a decent CrateDB cluster and max out the possibilities, users needed to be able to monitor and maintain the cluster. That’s why we constantly work on implementing new metrics and exposing them. In the future, CrateDB nodes can be decommissioned via SQL using ALTER CLUSTER.
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Keeping the code base clean
Delivering high quality software requires maintaining a high-quality codebase. To do so we removed unused features. Before doing so we always properly deprecate them. See our list of DEPRECATIONS for 3.3