Release Highlights

• Much improved performance of synchronous replication and durability. Our synchronous replication now has only a minor performance penalty compared to our already fast asynchronous replication – giving you better data consistency guarantees without incurring large performance penalties. You can read more about our improved synchronous replication here.

• Selective queries on columnstore tables now run faster, via sub-segment access

• Hash indexes on columnstore tables are now supported. CREATE TABLE and ALTER TABLE now support adding and dropping hash indexes on columnstore tables.

• By default, UPDATE and DELETE queries now lock columnstore tables at the row level, allowing improved concurrency. Previously, these queries locked columnstore tables on the segment level.

• Sparse rowstore compression is now supported.

• Queries on columnstore tables can now reorder filters to decrease execution time. Reordering occurs automatically and allows filters that are more selective to be evaluated first.

To upgrade a self-managed install to this release, follow this guide.

To make a backup of a database in this release or to restore a database backup to this release, follow this guide.

In addition to the release highlights noted above, the following new features and improvements are available in this release: