# Additional Features and Improvements in this Release

## Storage

* **Partition splitting**, implemented as an option to the `BACKUP` command, allows you double the number of partitions in a database easily. You may wish to increase the number of partitions to accommodate more leaves, or to enable more parallelism.
* Added support for full backups to Google Cloud Storage (GCS). Also added support for incremental backups to GCS, S3, and Azure. For more information, see the **Backing Up and Restoring Data** topic.
* Added **global temporary tables**, which are similar temporary tables, except that they exist beyond the duration of a client session.
* When creating a table, you can now specify that a `DATETIME` or `DATETIME(6)` column should be **populated with the current timestamp** when inserting or updating a row in the table.
* Highly selective joins on columnstores are now more efficient. A highly selective join has a very selective filter on one table which produces a few rows and these rows are joined with another table.

## Query Optimization

* Enhanced cardinality estimation for joins using histograms.
* Updated the behavior of the **DROP ALL FROM PLANCACHE** command; it now purges all query plans from memory and disk.
* Added more support for queries that use **scalar nested subselects**.
* Added the **NOPARAM()** function that disables the parameterization of constants when a query is compiled.
* Improved optimization of hash joins involving expressions.

## Usability and Programmability

* You can now access **record variable fields** inside of a SQL statement in procedural SQL.
* Added the **information\_schema.MV\_BLOCKED\_QUERIES** view, which provides a summary of activities that are currently waiting.
* Added the **TO\_NUMBER()** function, which converts a `CHAR` or a `VARCHAR` value to a `DECIMAL` value.
* Added the **TABLE()** function, which converts a procedural SQL array to a set of rows.
* Added the **TRUNC(date)** and **TRUNC(number)** functions. `TRUNC(date)` lets you truncate a date to a specified granularity. `TRUNC(number)` lets you truncate a given number to a specified number of decimal places.
* Added the **INET6\_ATON() **function, which converts an IPv6 or IPv4 internet address from its text representation to its binary representation.
* Added the \[**INET6\_NTOA()** function, which converts an IPv6 or IPv4 internet address from its binary representation to its text representation.
* Added the **REGEXP\_SUBSTR()** function, which searches for a regular expression pattern and returns the matching substring.
* Stored procedures now support the `CREATE VIEW` and `DROP VIEW` commands.
* **ECHO SELECT** now supports `ECHO SELECT <expr>` where `<expr>` is a variable or record field. Previously, an alias was required as in `ECHO SELECT <expr> as <alias>`.

## Data Ingest

* **Google Cloud Storage (GCS) Pipelines**

## Security

* Added **configurable password complexity rules**. Now you can specify criteria for passwords, including criteria such as minimum length or the number of uppercase, lowercase, numeric, and special characters.
* Added a configurable account lockout feature. You can specify the number of times a user can enter an incorrect password before they are locked out of the system. When a user reaches this limit, their account is locked for the specified number of seconds. For more information on the failed login attempt lockout feature, see **Securing SingleStore**.
* `OPTIMIZE TABLE` now requires the `INSERT` permission.

## Other

* Fixed a race condition where plan eviction during a distributed join would cause the error “MemSQL code generation has failed: Cannot compile from background threads”.
* Fixed a bug where decimals lose precision when scientific notation is parsed.

***

Modified at: July 11, 2023

Source: [/db/v9.1/release-notes/singlestore-memsql/7-1-release-notes/additional-features-and-improvements-in-this-release/](https://docs.singlestore.com/db/v9.1/release-notes/singlestore-memsql/7-1-release-notes/additional-features-and-improvements-in-this-release/)

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