CitusDB 4.0 release notes

We're excited to announce general availability of CitusDB 4.0, which is based on the new PostgreSQL 9.4 release. CitusDB is our full featured, turnkey database solution for fully scalable, highly-available PostgreSQL. A licensed solution, CitusDB allows you to scale out PostgreSQL across commodity servers and also parallel process queries across the cluster for real-time analytics on big data.

This release brings exciting new functionality and performance improvements, including:

• Support for real-time workloads:
  • CitusDB enterprise now integrates with pg_shard to support real-time workloads. This integration brings together scalable analytics and low-latency writes in one system.
• Integration with PostgreSQL 9.4 to bring features like:
  • jsonb, a faster, more efficient data type for storing JSON data.
  • Faster and smaller GIN indexes.
  • Many more! See here for a full list of the new PostgreSQL 9.4 features.
• Re-balancing the cluster for incremental scalability and fault tolerance:
  • Incrementally add nodes, and uniformly distribute data and thus traffic to those nodes.
  • Re-replicate data from failed nodes evenly across all the remaining ones.
• Faster query performance:
  • A new task-assignment policy for better in-memory workload performance.
  • Binary serialization for data copied between nodes, for faster performance on queries fetching a lot of data.
  • Batching task-assignment calls for improved performance with re-partition joins.
  • Fixed a bug which was causing more data than necessary to be copied over the network.
• Improved usability:
  • Modified \STAGE to allow loading data from any node in the cluster, making data-loads much easier, and also allowing for a more uniform data placement.
  • Query throttling in the real-time executor to prevent resource exhaustion when queries touch thousands of shards.

Installation notes

CitusDB 4.0 is based on PostgreSQL 9.4.0, and is binary incompatible with CitusDB 3.0. As a result, the install path for the new version has changed from /opt/citusdb/3.0 to /opt/citusdb/4.0 in order to allow for multiple versions of Citus DB to be installed in parallel.

If you are running CitusDB 3.0 and want to upgrade to v4.0, you will need to run pg_upgrade on your all nodes, and manually reload your distributed metadata. For specifics, please get in touch with us so we can assist with the upgrade process. If you are downloading and using CitusDB for the first time, please follow the installation instructions found in the CitusDB documentation page.

Download it now at citusdata.com/downloads.

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