6.2 Release Notes

Core

• The size limit for primary keys has been increased to 320 bytes [1]

• Dictionary encoding performance enhancements

• Jobs can now be performed asynchronously

• The Kinetica File System (KiFS) has been introduced to greatly ease ML workflows centered around file processing and file generation

• Non-HA multi-head primary key lookup is now possible using the RecordRetriever object available in the Java and Python APIs

• HA support for multi-head primary key lookup and multi-head ingest

• /alter/table jobs are now cancellable

• A Host Manager-controlled alerting system for application-level significant events and hardware resource usage. Alerts can be managed via gpudb.conf, and you can view the most recent alerts in Kinetica Administration Application (GAdmin)

• Improvements to aggregation:

  • Aggregates listed in a HAVING expression no longer have to exist in the column name list
  • Aggregates can now be listed before grouping attributes in the column name list
  • Additional grouping functions (for both SQL and the native APIs):
    • Rollup
    • Cube
    • Grouping Sets

• Full Materialized View support via SQL or the native APIs--any number of source tables and intermediary tables & operations can be involved in creating a materialized view

• Various improvements to the GAdmin user interface

• Support for rank, partition, and window functionality in both SQL and the native APIs

• The Python API has been updated to include an extension that enables increased speed when inserting and retrieving records from a GPUdbTable object

• Joins can now be created using derived columns, e.g.,

  h_db.create_join_table(
    join_table_name="my_join",
    table_names=[table.alias("a"),table.alias("b")],
    column_names=["a.x as ax","b.y as by","a.x+b.y as c"],
    expressions=["a.x = b.x"]
  )
  

• The /aggregate/statistics endpoint can now tune the behavior of the percentile() function using a second, comma-separated resolution value. The higher the resolution, the more accurate the estimation is but the longer the calculation takes, e.g., a 50th percentile resolution of 200:

  h_db.aggregate_statistics(
      table_name="my_table"
      column_name="col1",
      stats="count,min,percentile(50,200)"
  )
  

Geospatial

• Improved symbology scaling

Security

• Passwords now have a character limit of 1024, and user names and role names now have a character limit of 64

SQL

• SQL Views & Materialized Views
  • CREATE VIEW
  • ALTER VIEW
  • REFRESH VIEW
  • DROP VIEW
• Operations:
  • Window Functions
  • PIVOT
  • UNPIVOT
  • Grouping Functions
    • Rollup
    • Cube
    • Grouping Sets

User-Defined Functions (UDFs)

• Improved performance of non-distributed UDF read and write
• Per-node concurrency limit setting available in GAdmin or the max_concurrency_per_node option in the /create/proc endpoint
• Each UDF API has access to a status field under ProcData that helps convey status information during UDF execution

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Footnotes

[1]	Primary key max length increased from 160 to 320 in version 6.2.0.25