We’re pleased to announce the release of XTDB 2.0.0-beta6 
There are some breaking configuration changes, but largely this release has been driven by the real-world practical usage of our Design Partners (thanks folks!) - the sorts of changes that don’t make for exciting release announcements, but the ones you appreciate when you’re actually working with the database day-to-day.
2.0.0-beta7, however, is a different story - we’ll be bringing you the first database migration since we released beta1, in order to better support a wider variety of temporal data shapes. More details below!
While you’re here, one date for you diary: Jeremy will be giving a talk on “Streamlining Regulatory Compliance and Reporting with XTDB: The Future of Bitemporal Data Management” - 19th February at 15:00 UK/16:00 CET/10:00 ET. Come join us for a deep dive into how XTDB can transform your data management strategy - making data reconciliation, reporting, and analysis simpler, more accurate, and cost-effective. Hope to see you there, of course - but if you can’t make it, do still sign up, and we’ll send you the recording.
You can find all of the details in the release notes.
Beta7 preview
In this iteration, we’re particularly looking at optimising data where the number of distinct entities is relatively low, but each entity has a significant number of updates through its history - think market pricing data or sensor readings. The proposed index structure makes a cleaner separation of current and historical data (both explicitly superseded and data that’s still valid but not as recent, like old orders/trades), so we’re expecting to see improved OLTP as-of-now query performance as well as being able to quickly identify the partitions required to serve a historical query.
We’re also naturally taking this opportunity to apply all of the disk format simplifications and improvements that we’ve had queued up for a while, like keeping more metadata about the data contained within each file and more table-level statistics, so that should speed things up as well!
There’ll likely be two options for migration:
- (easier) If your log still contains all of your transactions - it’s no longer mandatory in XT2, but we’re aware some folks still do - just spin up a new node in the background and let it replay.
- Otherwise, we’ll be releasing a migration tool from beta6 → beta7 - spin this up in the background as a one-shot task, let it run, then you’ll be able to do the usual green/blue release for the nodes themselves.
If you’d like early access to these changes, please do let us know!
Beyond that, we’re very much in the final stretch towards our General Availability (GA) release - hence the iteration on our underlying data structures before launch. Thank you to everyone who’s worked with us throughout this beta phase - your feedback and guidance has been instrumental in steering XTDB v2 towards becoming what we hope is a very exciting and valuable open-source tool.
Get in touch!
As always, we’d love to hear your thoughts - you can get in touch either through GitHub, https://discuss.xtdb.com, or hello@xtdb.com.
Cheers!
James & the XT Team