8.0 Release Notes

Added support for fast seeking into JSON columns in a universal storage table using subsegment access.

Improved seek performance for string data types for universal storage for LZ4 and run-length encoded (RLE) data.

New Information Schema Views

Subselect related lockdown messages are now more informative and they indicate the line number and character offset of the subselect that caused the error. In addition, up to 100 bytes of text from the beginning of the referred subselect is also displayed.

SELECT (SELECT DISTINCT t1.a FROM t ORDER BY a) FROM t t1;

Old output: "Feature 'subselect containing dependent field inside group by' is not supported by SingleStore."

New output: "Feature 'subselect containing dependent field inside group by' is not supported by SingleStore.
    Near '(SELECT DISTINCT t1.a FROM t ORDER BY a) FROM t t1' at line 1, character 7."

Decreased the memory overhead for columnstore cardinality statistics by 25% as the first phase of an overall project to improve memory for auto-stats in general.

Improved performance for user-defined functions (UDFs) and Stored Procedures that take JSON arguments, and the JSON_TO_ARRAY command.

Updated the supported syntax for DROP … FROM PLANCACHE so plans on a specified node and plans from all aggregators based on the query text can be dropped.

DROP plan_id FROM PLANCACHE ON NODE node_id;

DROP PLAN FROM PLANCACHE [ON AGGREGATORS] FOR QUERY <query_text>;

Setting Collation for String Literals

You can set the collation for string literals explicitly:Character Set and Collation Override

SELECT "My string" COLLATE utf8mb4_unicode_ci;

Created the ALTER USER permission. Users must have this permission or the GRANT permission to be able to execute the ALTER USER command.

Added ALTER USER ... ACCOUNT LOCK to manually lock accounts:

ALTER USER 'test'@'%' ACCOUNT LOCK;

ALTER USER 'test'@'%' ACCOUNT UNLOCK;

Added sampling (a small portion of the rows in the table are used for analysis) for Reference tables as part of query optimization.

Improved the performance of the PROFILE functionality such as lower memory overheads, lower performance impacts to OLAP queries, and better statistics collecting.

Added support for improved segment elimination in queries with WHERE clauses containing DATE and TIME functions. The functions that are supported for segment elimination are DATE, DATE_TRUNC, TIMESTAMP, UNIX_TIMESTAMP, and YEAR. See each topic for specific examples.

The data_conversion_compatibility_level engine variable can now be set to '8.0' for stricter data type conversions. This will now be the default value. This new data_conversion_compatibility_level setting additionally flags invalid string-to-number conversion in INSERT statements.

The sync_permissions engine variable default value is now ON.The default value only impacts newly installed clusters. Existing clusters must be manually updated to the variable.

The enable_auto_profile engine variable now has a third value: LITE. LITE is the new default value for new customers. It has a lower memory overhead that ON. The default value for existing customers is ON.

The columnstore_small_blob_combination_threshold engine variable default value has been changed to 5242880 bytes. Prior to the 8.0 release, the default value was 33554432 bytes.

Added support for encoded GROUP BY clauses in queries containing conditional and character expressions in aggregate functions.

Expanded the type of query execution operations (hash joins, window functions, and sort operations) to offload memory to disk using spilling to allow a large memory footprint query to succeed at the cost of query execution times in a memory constraint environment.

Added support for ? and [ ] glob patterns to FS pipelines.

Added the optional parameter DEFINER for CREATE PROCEDURE, FUNCTION, and AGGREGATE.

Added ability for a JSON computed column to be returned in a query instead of the entire document.

Added ability to use use the ORDER BY clause with the JSON_AGG function.

Expressions can be assigned to system variables. System variables, literals, or any combination of these can be referenced using built-ins like CONCAT as a variant of complex expressions.

For unlimited storage databases, SingleStoreDB caches data from remote storage on local disks or SSDs. It uses a modified least-recently-used (LRU(2)) replacement policy. Information is retained to indicate if objects are frequently-accessed. This reduces the chance that a single large query will flush frequently-accessed data from the cache.

Added support for the AUTO option in the computed column definition clause of a CREATE TABLE statement to automatically infer the data type of a computed column expression. For more information, see CREATE TABLE.

Added two Workload Management engine variables: workload_management_queue_size_allow_upgrade and workload_management_dynamic_resource_allocation. These variables work together to dynamically move queries to another queue if the original queue is saturated.

Storage of CHAR(<length>) as VARCHAR(<length>): For a column defined as type CHAR of length len, SingleStoreDB will store the column as a VARCHAR of length len if len greater than or equal to the value of the new engine variable varchar_column_string_optimization_length. If the value of the variable is 0, the column is not stored as a VARCHAR.

After adding a new leaf node to a cluster and rebalancing partitions, the blob cache on the new leaf is warmed with copies of blobs from the node originally holding data that has been moved to the new leaf. This is done before the new leaf begins handling queries. It is fully automatic.

The BACKUP command no longer blocks the ALTER TABLE and several other commands for the duration of the backup. This allows you to run commands like TRUNCATE on your tables even during the backup of a very large deployment. For a complete list of commands no longer blocked during backup refer to Commands Not Blocked by the BACKUP Process.

Added the ability to use JSON_MATCH_<ANY>. Returns true if, in the JSON, there is a value at the specified filter path which evaluates the optional filter predicate as true. If no filter predicate is provided, will return true if the filter path exists.

Made the following Selectivity Estimation improvements:

Made the following Query Optimization enhancements: