# 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:

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Modified at: April 24, 2021

Source: [/db/v9.1/release-notes/singlestore-memsql/7-0-release-notes/release-highlights/](https://docs.singlestore.com/db/v9.1/release-notes/singlestore-memsql/7-0-release-notes/release-highlights/)

(An index of the documentation is available at /llms.txt)