[ANN] Early access snapshot 2024-06-18

Users
,
1

Hey all - we’ve released another snapshot of the XT2 early access: :rocket:

  • SQL: built-in columns now accessible through _id, _valid_from etc (rather than xt$id, xt$valid_from) - they remain :xt/id in Clojure.
  • XTQL: we’ve removed support for XTQL from the Java/Kotlin and JSON API. Openly, this didn’t fulfil the promises we wanted it to, it wasn’t nearly as elegant to use from any other language as it is using Clojure’s s-exprs, and the feedback we received from outside the Clojure community was largely that people would much prefer to use existing knowledge and familiar tooling - fair enough!
  • Pgwire:
    • As part of our ongoing schema inference work, columns that only contain one data-type are now returned as such - e.g. a column containing only integers will now be returned as integers.
    • We’ve added the ability to start the server on any available port - pass it :port 0 and then call node.getPgPort() / (pgw/pg-port node) to get the assigned port. Useful for test fixtures where you’re creating a new in-memory XTDB node for every test.
  • … as well as a good handful of bugfixes, of course.

As always, let us know if you run into any issues or have any questions!

Cheers,

XT Team

2 Likes
2

Hi jarohen,

Does this mean that there effectively is no way to use XTQL from a Java/Kotlin application anymore?
I must say that having the option of using a query language that is easy to programmatically generate and supports logic variable bindings, is one of the things that drew me to XTDB.

Disclaimer: I’ve only discovered XTDB last week and my experience is limited to some basic ingest/querying operations using the Kotlin interfaces.

3

Hey @wkerckho, welcome :wave:

It does for now, I’m afraid, yep. We’ll likely continue to iterate on it, but for the time being it’s not an API we want to commit to - the overwhelming feedback we’ve had so far has been that people outside of the Clojure ecosystem tend to prefer existing SQL tools that achieve a similar aim.

Cheers,

James

4

Good to know, thank you!

1 Like
5

IMO the Clojure market was extremely tight this year and it may mean that the results are skewed.
I also liked the XTDBv1’s implementation of the query system more but they really seem to be incompatible and I can’t judge for changing how it works.

1 Like