RavenDB 2.5: What's New Here?

Well, this is still just a high level list only, but there is a lot of stuff there. In many cases, I posted full blog entries about each new feature, but I’ll post a few words about those that I didn’t.

Features:

• Dynamic Reporting
• Result Transformers
• Scripted Index Results
• Create new document from existing ones using the Patch API
• Spatial Enhancements
• Unbounded Streams support
• Excel integration CSV endpoint
• MSI Installer
• Use Northwind for sample data

Indexing:

• Index directly to memory
• Query optimizer can expand indexes
• Idle indexes & index priorities
• Allow to lock indexes

Improvements:

• Better pre fetching algorithms for reducing IO times
• SQL Replication is more robust, and performs significantly faster
• DTC performance improvement
• Better adherence to the DTC protocol
• Will refresh the index writer every now and then, avoiding high memory costs for active indexes
• An error in bulk insert would report immediately, instead of waiting for the process to complete
• Removed db write lock and enabled completely concurrent writes

Studio:

• Consolidated Documents & Collections screen
• Easier settings management
• Streamlined the UI
• Validate replication information from the studio
• Can now look at a sample document while editing an index

Operations - As usual, we have a few goodies for the ops people. Some of them aren’t really interesting to devs, but they are part of creating production quality software. We now allow Backup Operators (and not just admins) to initiate backups, and if you are restoring a db from another machine with different settings, RavenDB will automatically set things up so you don’t have to manually do anything to get things working. We also added a bunch more of endpoints for debug & analysis and added some more information to our existing endpoints.