What's New in v19.1.0

What's New in v19.1.0

April 30, 2019

With the release of CockroachDB v19.1, we’ve made a variety of security, performance, and usability improvements. A few highlights:

Enhanced security: CockroachDB now supports transparent data encryption at rest and integrates with existing LDAP directory services within an organization to simplify user account management.
Native Change Data Capture: CockroachDB extends its streaming data capabilities by enabling data to flow more easily to backend warehouses, with support for publishing distributed, row-level change feeds directly into cloud storage for downstream processing.
High-performance multi-region deployments: Our cost-based optimizer can now use data locality to optimize queries so you can get low-latency queries even when your data may be spread across regions. We’ve also added follower reads to improve read performance for certain geo-distributed workloads.

Check out a comprehensive summary of the most significant, user-facing changes and then upgrade to CockroachDB v19.1. You can also read more about these changes in the v19.1 blog post or sign up for our live webinar on May 9th where we'll dive into the details of the new capabilities.

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Downloads

Docker image

$ docker pull cockroachdb/cockroach:v19.1.0

Summary

This section summarizes the most significant, user-facing changes in v19.1.0. For a complete list of features and changes, including bug fixes and performance improvements, see the release notes for previous testing releases.

Managed service offering

Feature	Description
Managed CockroachDB Console	Paid managed CockroachDB customers can now sign into their organization's account, view the connection string details, add and edit their IP whitelists on the management console.

Enterprise features

These features require an enterprise license. Register for a 30-day trial license here.

Feature	Description
Encryption at Rest	Encryption at rest provides transparent encryption of a node's data on the local disk. This feature was introduced as experimental in v2.1 and is now ready for production use.
GSSAPI with Kerberos Authentication	CockroachDB now supports the Generic Security Services API (GSSAPI) with Kerberos authentication, which lets you use an external enterprise directory system that supports Kerberos, such as Active Directory.
Follower Reads	This feature reduces read latencies by allowing queries to perform historical reads of the closest replica of a given piece of data rather than reading from the more distant "leaseholder" replica. To enable follower reads on a query, use the `experimentalfollower_read_timestamp()` built-in function in conjunction with the `AS OF SYSTEM TIME` clause.
Prefer Closest Secondary Index	Given multiple identical indexes that have different locality constraints using replication zones, the cost-based optimizer will now prefer the index that is closest to the gateway node that is planning the query. In a properly configured geo-distributed cluster, this can lead to performance improvements due to improved data locality and reduced network traffic. This feature enables scenarios where reference data such as a table of postal codes can be replicated to different regions, and queries will use the copy in the same region.
Change Data Capture	CDC in v19.1 includes many improvements to production-readiness. `CHANGEFEED`s delivering data to Apache Kafka/Confluent Platform are now fully supported, and a new cloud storage sink allows `CHANGEFEED`s to deliver table updates as JSON files to endpoints like Google Storage or AWS S3. A new push-based internal data delivery mechanism called _rangefeeds helps deliver data with increased reliability and lower latency.

Core features

These features are freely available in the core version and do not require an enterprise license.

Feature	Description
Load-Based Splitting	CockroachDB now automatically splits frequently accessed keys into smaller ranges to optimize your cluster’s performance.
Query Optimizer Hints	The cost-based optimizer now supports hint syntax to force the use of merge, hash, or lookup joins. This let you override the cost-based optimizer's join algorithm selection in cases where you have information about your data that the cost-based optimizer does not yet have.
Correlated Subqueries	Most correlated subqueries are now decorrelated and processed by the cost-based-optimizer. For those that cannot be decorrelated, CockroachDB now emits an "apply" operator that executes a sub-plan for every row in its input. This allows CockroachDB to execute a large number of additional correlated subqueries that were not able to be executed in v2.1.
Core Changefeeds	CockroachDB now offers a non-enterprise version of change data capture, via the `EXPERIMENTAL CHANGEFEED FOR` statement, to consume table updates over a streaming Postgres connection.
Cost-Based Optimizer	The cost-based optimizer now supports almost all read-only queries (except window functions) and almost all mutations (e.g., `CREATE TABLE AS`, `INSERT`, `UPDATE`, `UPSERT`, `DELETE`). In addition, the cost-based optimizer now reorders up to 4 joins in a query to attempt to find the most performant ordering (via the the new `reorder_joins_limit` session variable) and takes advantage of automatically generated table statistics without impacting foreground traffic. Note that statistics are created by default on all indexed columns when a user upgrades to this version. Finally, a query plan cache now saves a portion of the planning time for frequent queries used in the cost-based optimizer.
Logical Plans in the Admin UI	The Statement Details page in the Admin UI now shows the ordered steps CockroachDB will take to execute a query (i.e., the `EXPLAIN` output). This helps you identify bottlenecks caused by how queries are planned by our heuristic and cost-based optimizers.
Cascading Replication Zones	Newly created replication zones will now inherit empty values from their parent. For example, if the replication zone for a table is not explicitly set with `num_replicas`, it will inherit that value from its direct parent, whether that's the `.default` replication zone from the entire cluster or the replication zone for the database containing the table.
Custom Savepoints	CockroachDB now supports custom naming of `SAVEPOINT`s for compatibility with ORMs and other third-party tools.

Backward-incompatible changes

Before upgrading to CockroachDB v19.1.0, be sure to review the following backward-incompatible changes and adjust your application as necessary.

CockroachDB no longer supports the B'abcde' notation to express byte array literals. This notation now expresses bit array literals like in PostgreSQL. The b'…' notation remains for byte array literals.
The normalized results of certain timestamp + duration operations involving year or month durations have been adjusted to agree with the values returned by PostgreSQL.
The CHANGEFEED experimental-avro option has been renamed experimental_avro.
Timezone abbreviations, such as EST, are no longer allowed when parsing or converting to a date/time type. Previously, an abbreviation would be accepted if it were an alias for the session's timezone.
The way composite foreign key matches are evaluated has changed to match the Postgres behavior. If your schema currently uses composite keys, it may require updates, since this change may affect your foreign key constraints and cascading behavior. For more details and guidance, see this note.
Mutation statements like UPDATE, INSERT, and DELETE no longer attempt to guarantee mutation or output ordering when an ORDER BY clause is present. It is now an error to use ORDER BY without LIMIT with the UPDATE statement.

Known limitations

For information about limitations we've identified in CockroachDB v19.1, with suggested workarounds where applicable, see Known Limitations.

Documentation

Topic	Description
Geo-Partitioning	Added a video and tutorial on using geo-partitioning to get very fast reads and writes in a broadly distributed cluster.
Security	Added an overview of CockroachDB security, with a dedicated page on authentication, encryption, authorization, and SQL audit logging.
Troubleshooting	Added much more guidance on troubleshooting cluster setup and troubleshooting SQL behavior.
Architecture	Added the Life of a Distributed Transaction, which details the path that a query takes through CockroachDB's architecture, starting with a SQL client and progressing all the way to RocksDB (and then back out again). Also added Reads and Writes in CockroachDB, which explains how reads and writes are affected by the replicated and distributed nature of data in CockroachDB.
Production Guidance	Expanded the Production Checklist with more current hardware recommendations and additional guidance on storage, file systems, and clock synchronization. Also added a library of common Cluster Topology Patterns.
ORMs	Expanded the SQLAlchemy tutorial to provide code for transaction retries and best practices for using SQLAlchemy with CockroachDB.
Training	Added geo-partitioning, Kubernetes, and TPC-C benchmarking modules to the intro to CockroachDB training.