Finally here is some good news! Our latest release is now available for download.
While summer is slowly but surely drawing to an end, we are rushing to announce that our latest release is now available for download.
What’s new?
NOT operator in Data Discovery
SlashDB offers wide variety of built-in filtering capabilities. GraphQL (the open-source data query and manipulation language for APIs), requires complicated query syntax in a POST request. SlashDB provides much of the same resource traversal capability, but it utilizes simple URLs, which are easy to understand, test and develop against.
To learn more about the newly added NOT operator and other filtering capabilities please see our documentation at https://docs.slashdb.com/user-guide/data-discoverymdgetting-around-data.html#filtering
SQLCipher
Out of the box, SlashDB now supports SQLCipher as a new database backend. SQLCipher is a variant of SQLite with added data encryption features.
Python 3
Given the size and complexity of our code this was a major undertaking, but we have completed migration away from the now obsolete Python 2. While this change is largely invisible to end users, it will help with application performance and allow us to leverage the language’s latest features and security improvements.
Python Wheels
From this release forward, we are adding Python’s .whl format as a packaging option, allowing developers to install it into their Python virtual environments with ease, using the standard pip tool.
Rest assured that we will continue shipping SlashDB as system-level packages for Linux and as pre-built virtual machines for VMWare, VirtualBox, Hyper-V, Amazon Machine Image, Azure VM, Docker and Vagrant.
For more information about all installation options that SlashDB offers please see User Guide at https://docs.slashdb.com/user-guide/getting-slashdb.html
What’s better?
Logging
We took great care to configure the same log message format for all components. This way, diagnostics can be accomplished more easily. For example, one can easily concatenate SlashDB logs with those of the web server, sort it, filter for a specific request, and trace its journey through the component stack.
MariaDB
Up until now SlashDB supported MariaDB using DBAPI libraries for MySQL libraries. This is not changing for the time being, but in the database connection wizard, users can now select each database independently.
Connection String Override
SlashDB comes with a database connection wizard, which allows users to easily setup new databases. But the ability to override those settings can be very useful in some circumstances, such as when dealing with non-standard drivers or databases servers on IBM i Series. The user interface now allows for editing all elements of the connection string.
User Experience
There are many incremental improvements to list, but the overall experience of search boxes, drop downs and screen layout all look and feel more user friendly. We also improved error messages in a number of places. The Welcome Wizard now flows seamlessly into the database connection wizard.
Core, multiprocessing and cluster operation
Of the 61 issues and new features, there are 12 fixes for various issues and anomalies in response rendering and concurrency.
Of note are:
- fixes to rare but reproducible issues in configuration synchronization under multi-process and load-balanced cluster
- rendering of response body for status code HTTP 201 Created in JSON and XML
- use of Content-Location response headers with HTTP 201 Created
- fixed character encoding of href elements in JSON and XML