6.1 Release Notes

APIs

• The Python API can be installed from PyPI
• Database backups possible while the system is still online
• The /wms endpoint has had numerous enhancements:
  • Support for tables with multiple geospatial columns
  • Additional RASTER and CB_RASTER mode options
  • The ability to use a default class for the CB_RASTER mode
• The Java API BulkInserter will automatically retry any failed inserts to attempt to handle errors automatically
• The PIVOT operation is enabled via the /aggregate/groupby endpoint options pivot and pivot_values. See Pivot for more information
• The UNPIVOT operation is enabled via the new /aggregate/unpivot endpoint

Cloud Deployment

• Marketplace instances with proper licensing and monitoring hooks are now available for AWS and Azure
• An auto-launcher for AWS and Azure has been developed to allow users to "bring your own license" and set cluster size parameters for easy button deployment

Connectors

• Spark Connector redesigned to focus on massive parallel ingestion performance
• FME Connector now supports all native data types and null values

Core

• Column-based Compression now available for most data types to reduce the size of data in memory
• Dictionary Encoding now available to reduce memory usage for low-to-medium cardinality fixed-length string columns
• Multi-table joins performance has been enhanced
• A variety of date/time, conversion, aggregation, and math functions have been added
• Result tables from the /aggregate/groupby, /aggregate/unique, /aggregate/unpivot, /create/projection, and /create/union operations are now updatable and can exist as in-memory tables or as persisted tables
• The size limit for primary keys has been increased to 160 bytes
• The ability to specify a new shard key in a result table is available

Geospatial

• By moving to a new OpenGL Framework architecture, geospatial visualizations--most notably polygon and line geometries with high vertex counts, scatter plots, and complex graphs or charts--have been greatly improved
• 2D Chart rendering has also been accelerated
• Added the highest priority filters and geospatial functions as defined by ST_Geometry to enhance geospatial processing
• Geospatial columns are now fully supported
• Spatial joins via Expressions

Installation / Management

• The Kinetica deployment process has been simplified. The Kinetica Administration Application (GAdmin) interface handles all deployment administration, even across multiple nodes
• The new Host Manager service is an independent supervisor process that manages several processes that are part of Kinetica, restarting them automatically should they fail unexpectedly. Host Manager also helps investigate problems and monitor cluster-wide performance
• A new Job Manager feature monitors all incoming jobs for Kinetica and maintains request ordering across the nodes in your Kinetica cluster. Job Manager can assist in cancelling extremely long or stalled jobs
• GAdmin's user interface has been overhauled to provide a more user-friendly experience, including inline documentation, APIs, and driver links/downloads; access to SQL Query Tool; and simplification of cluster administration. Also, GAdmin is now compatible with Internet Explorer

Reveal

• Time series reports are now filterable
• The roles and permissions model for non-admin users has been improved to provide a better out-of-the-box experience

Security

• Reveal and ODBC are now integrated with the Kinetica authorization system
• Kinetica now supports mapping database roles to LDAP/Active Directory groups
• Database auditing capability per user and per endpoint has been significantly improved
• Additional settings have been added to the ODBC client and server configuration files to allow for a more comprehensive setup

SQL

• All new geospatial functions have been exposed for SQL usage

• Operations: INSERT, CREATE TEMP TABLE AS, CREATE VRAM TABLE AS

• Functions: KI_SHARD_KEY

• Data type: DATETIME

• New KI hint that enables specifying a Job ID tag to assist in cancelling the job if necessary: KI_HINT_JOBID_PREFIX(x)

• Additional alterable properties available:

  • ALTER TABLE ... SET ... COMPRESSION [TO compression_type]
  • ALTER TABLE ... SET [ACCESS MODE|PROTECTED]
  • ALTER TABLE ... [SET SCHEMA | MOVE TO] ...

• Schema/collection alteration from SQL is now supported; operations available:

  • ALTER [SCHEMA | COLLECTION] ... ALLOW HOMOGENOUS [TABLES] <TRUE | FALSE>
  • ALTER [SCHEMA | COLLECTION ] ... SET PROTECTED <TRUE | FALSE>
  • ALTER [SCHEMA | COLLECTION] ... RENAME TO ...
  • ALTER [SCHEMA | COLLECTION] ... SET TTL ...

• Support for equality of lists, e.g.,

  SELECT *
  FROM calcs
  WHERE (str, num) = ('FURNITURE', 12.3);
  

User-Defined Functions (UDFs)

• Performance enhancements to accelerate output table creation
• Improved GPU multi-tenancy by including GPU usage metrics data structure
• Deepchem package added to the User-Defined Function runtime environment
• A UDF simulator script is packaged with the Python API that allows you to simulate running any type of UDF (Java, C++, or Python) without the UDF having to be created in the database