SingleStore is proud to announce the general availability of SingleStoreDB Self-Managed 7.3 for immediate download. SingleStoreDB Self-Managed 7.3 is also available today on Singlestore Helios, the company’s elastic cloud database, available on public cloud providers around the world.
At SingleStore, we are building the next great database platform. SingleStoreDB is a distributed operational database that delivers speed and scale. As the leading NewSQL platform for real-time analytics and augmented transaction processing [Ron19], SingleStoreDB can handle all your workloads in the cloud or in your data center. This release provides improved ingestion and multi-way join efficiency to further strengthen SingleStore for mission-critical applications providing transaction processing, operational analytics, and more.
This blog post describes the major features of SingleStoreDB Self-Managed 7.3 self-managed software and Singlestore Helios in some detail.
For a quick 5-minute rundown, checkout the release overview video here:
For even more detail, see the 7.3 release notes.
Why the Cloud World Needs to Simplify to Accelerate
The proliferation of special-purpose datastores is complicating cloud infrastructure, inflating cloud bills, and adding unnecessary latency in copying and moving data from multiple operational stores to analytical stores. To tame the growing cloud complexity and data infrastructure sprawl, organizations should look to solutions like SingleStore that unify workloads across operational and analytical use cases without sacrificing the speed, scale, and flexibility which makes special-purpose datastores attractive. With fewer types of datastores and less data movement among them, data infrastructure is simplified and there are fewer skill sets to maintain allowing you to focus on accelerating your business.
Major Features in SingleStoreDB Self-Managed 7.3
Along with improvements across the product, SingleStoreDB Self-Managed 7.3 provides notable features in the areas below:
Programmability
SingleStore supports the MPSQL language for programming internal extensions, including stored procedures and user-defined functions. The 7.3 release enhances this capability by providing additional flexibility for developers in these aspects:
- Query plans are smaller and thus use less memory than before.
- The new JSON_AGG function takes a rowset with an arbitrary set of relationships and returns a single JSON object.
- The new APPROX_PERCENTILE function does fast and accurate percentile calculations over large data sets and can be up to 10X faster than standard percentile functions like PERCENTILE_CONT.
- User-defined variables allow you to write statements that look like SELECT INTO @varname. User-defined variables have session scope, and you can use them across queries. Our customers frequently asked for UDVs since they are convenient when building complex SQL scripts.
- Now you can EXPLAIN and PROFILE queries within stored procedures for easier query tuning.
Flexibility for Developers
Singlestore Helios now has DDL forwarding, which allows you to send both DDL and DML statements to any aggregator. This simplifies things for your developers so they don’t have to remember which endpoint to use based on the type of operation.
Cloud-Native Ingestion Enhancements
This release has enhancements for data ingestion that are helpful for cloud deployments:
- SELECT … INTO GCS allows you to load data from Singlestore Helios into a Google Cloud Store bucket. The syntax is similar to the existing SELECT … INTO S3 command.
- A new configuration option multipart_chunk_size_mb allows you to load up to 5 TB of data per partition when running SELECT … INTO S3.
- Singlestore Helios pipelines now integrate with Confluent schema registry, making it easy to add and remove fields from Avro schemas.
Multi-way Join Efficiency Improvements
For queries that join more than 18 tables, the query optimizer generates plans more quickly and produces query plans that run faster. This enhancement is especially helpful for our large enterprise customers.
Universal Storage
SingleStore Universal Storage technology is a suite of features that we are delivering over several releases. The aim of this technology is to support real-time analytics and online transaction processing (OLTP) on SingleStore, with great performance and low total cost of ownership (TCO).
Universal Storage is an extension of our columnstore technology that excels at analytics and which also improves OLTP, including support for indexes, unique keys, seeks, and fast, highly selective, nested-loop-style joins. Because the data is highly compressed and doesn’t all have to fit in RAM, Universal Storage gives excellent TCO.
In this release, Singlestore Helios extends Universal Storage with these features:
- INSERT … ON DUPLICATE KEY UPDATE allows you to update an old row when trying to insert a unique key that already exists. This operation is commonly known as UPSERT.
- You can now set the default table type to columnstore by setting the default_table_type global variable appropriately.
- Simplified syntax for creating columnstore tables where you can write SORT KEY (…) instead of KEY (…) USING CLUSTERED COLUMNSTORE.
- Universal storage is now the default table for Singlestore Helios.
For a detailed explanation of what’s new in Universal Storage, read Eric Hanson’s blog post here.
Greater Operations Visibility & Resilience
Release 7.3 of SingleStoreDB Self-Managed has improvements that make the product easier and more robust to operate and monitor:
- The new PROMOTE AGGREGATOR command lets you switch the master aggregator of your cluster without stopping the old master aggregator. This helps you keep your cluster online during maintenance.
- The SHOW REPLICATION STATUS command now has columns that give a clear picture of how far secondary partitions are from primary partitions. In particular, the ESTIMATED_CATCHUP_TIME_S column shows how long it will take the secondary partition to catch up to the primary one.
- A new management view LMV_BACKUP_STATUS permits you to track the progress of a running backup along with the estimated time remaining.
- SingleStoreDB Self-Managed lets you create resource pools for specifying resource limits so that non-critical workloads do not overwhelm your cluster. You can now run the BACKUP and RESTORE commands in resource pools to manage how much CPU they use.
These are just a few of the new features you’ll get when you upgrade to SingleStoreDB Self-Managed 7.3. For the full list of features, see the release notes at docs.singlestore.com.
Conclusion
The SingleStoreDB Self-Managed 7.3 release delivers a big advance in our ability to support system-of-record applications on SingleStore, including improvements to Universal Storage (upserts, default table type); replication status monitoring; easier Avro schema migrations; faster large joins; and more.
Are you interested in building a data platform with unlimited scale and power? Come join our growing team at http://www.singlestore.com/careers.
References
[Ron19] Adam Ronthal, There is Only One DBMS Market!, https://blogs.gartner.com/adam-ronthal/2019/07/17/one-dbms-market/, Gartner, 2019.
