Happy New Year; r1.36 released; new GUI
Since it is time to bid 2022 goodbye, and welcome 2023, we at YottaDB would like to send you our heartfelt best wishes for a Happy New Year. We wish for you a happy 2023, ideally more uneventful and with less drama than recent years.
As you might expect, we have been developing software all year. YottaDB r1.36 is released, a new GUI awaits your beta testing pleasure, and Octo continues to gain additional functionality.
YottaDB r1.36 is a major release, not because it has a common theme, but because of the number of enhancements that it includes.
- On the x86_64 architecture, SUSE Enterprise Linux 15.x is a Supported platform
- There is new functionality for diagnostics, troubleshooting, and forensics. Of note, the %YDBJNLF utility program facilitates analyzing the voluminous information in journal files, including using SQL queries through Octo, e.g.,
select op,horologdate,horologtime,pid from YDBJNLFTYPE1 where gvref = '^CUST(5987154)' order by horologdate,horologtime;to find updates across multiple journal files to the customer record in global node ^CUST(5987154).
- There are enhancements to make programming easier.
r1.36 also inherits all enhancements and fixes from GT.M V6.3-012, V6.3-013, and V6.3-014 that were publicly released under a free/open source software license.
Full details are in the release notes at https://gitlab.com/YottaDB/DB/YDB/-/releases/r1.36
Please plan to upgrade your existing YottaDB installations to r1.36. We try hard to make every software release our best to date, and are confident that r1.36 will meet or exceed the quality you have come to expect of us.
We also have a brand new browser-based GUI console that is ready for you to beta test. After two prototypes that we abandoned but learned from, we have an approach that meets our needs. More importantly, we hope it meets your needs. An important feature is that all files, including JavaScript files, are versioned, and specific versions are served statically from the GUI installation, yielding better security and software stability over the long term.
To use the GUI, please follow the instructions at https://gitlab.com/YottaDB/UI/YDBGUI to install and start it. You will notice that while the GUI itself has no user documentation beyond the README, it has extensive hyperlinks to the YottaDB user documentation. Our goal is for the GUI itself to be intuitive enough to use without user documentation, while recognizing that for this goal to be feasible, user documentation for the depth and breadth of functionality in YottaDB must be at your fingertips. Please tell us how this works for you.
YottaDB Globals Dark Mode
The GUI is currently in field test. Since writing software only opens the door to writing more software, there is more to come. At https://gitlab.com/YottaDB/UI/YDBGUI/-/issues you can see the Issues we are tracking. Please use the GUI and add your input.
- If there is already an existing Issue that fits your needs, you can give it a thumbs up vote (or a thumbs down if you disagree with it!).
- You can add a comment to expand on or clarify your views on an Issue.
- You can create a new Issue if you feel no existing Issue matches your input.
- Of course, you can also e-mail us.
YottaDB Routines
YottaDB Routines Dark Mode
We continue to add functionality to Octo. Our first target was reporting & analytics of YottaDB applications, running in a replicated instance. It is in production use today for that purpose. Our next target is as a read-write SQL database, and Octo today implements INSERT, UPDATE, and DELETE. We are currently working on selected related requirements like constraints and VIEWs. So it is possible to use Octo as a pure RDBMS with no awareness of globals, as well as with explicit mapping of tables to globals (the latter for reporting and hybrid applications that use both relational and direct access to data). Octo automatically ensures that any direct global variable updates from any of YottaDB’s supported languages automatically update cross references and statistics used by SQL access. We are also working on supporting Microsoft PowerBI as a client, which will allow the Microsoft business intelligence tools to access Octo.
We have created a Docker image that has the current master branches of YottaDB, Octo, and the GUI, as well as an instance of the VistA electronic health record system with dummy patients. You can use it by running:
docker run -d -p 2222:22 -p 1338:1338 -p 8089:8089 -p 9430:9430 --name=octo-vehu download.yottadb.com/yottadb/octo-vehu:latest-master
With the container running:
- Point a browser to http://localhost:8089 to use the GUI
- Point the SQuirreL SQL PostgreSQL JDBC driver to jdbc:postgresql://localhost:1338/VEHU to access Octo
Complete instructions for the container are at https://hub.docker.com/r/yottadb/octo-vehu
Note: To access the container from a different machine may require that you review firewall settings for the system on which the container is running. As we update the container regularly, you can always try our latest software.
So, in addition to saying Happy New Year, we can also say Happy New Software. Please stay in touch and let us know if you would like us to mail you a cap (details at https://yottadb.com/where-are-the-users/).
Published on December 30, 2022