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Release Notes RonDB 26.04.0#

RonDB 26.04.0 is a release of the RonDB 26.04 series. It is the first release of RonDB 26.04.

RonDB 26.04.0 is based on MySQL NDB Cluster 8.4.8 and RonDB 26.02.0.

RonDB 22.10 is a Long-Term support version and will be maintained at least until at least 2026.

RonDB 24.10 is a Long-Term support version and will be maintained at least until 2027.

RonDB 25.10 is a Long-Term support version and will be maintained at least until 2028.

RonDB 26.02 is a Long-Term support version and will be maintained at least until 2028.

RonDB 26.04 is a development version and will be maintained at least until 2026.

RonDB 26.04 is released as open source SW with binary tarballs for usage in Linux. It is developed on Linux and Mac OS X and using WSL 2 on Windows (Linux on Windows).

RonDB 26.04.0 and onwards is supported on Linux/x86_64 and Linux/ARM64.

RonDB 26.04.0 is also available as a Docker container for both x86_64 and ARM CPUs and one can also use RonDB through rondb-helm, a Helm chart to use RonDB in Kubernetes.

The other platforms are currently for development and testing. Mac OS X is a development platform and will continue to be so.

Description of RonDB#

RonDB is designed to be used in a managed cloud environment where the user only needs to specify the type of the virtual machine used by the various node types. RonDB has the features required to build a fully automated managed RonDB solution.

It is designed for appplications requiring the combination of low latency, high availability, high throughput and scalable storage (LATS).

You can use RonDB in a Serverless version on app.hopsworks.ai. In this case Hopsworks manages the RonDB cluster and you can use it for your machine learning applications. You can use this version for free with certain quotas on the number of Feature Groups (tables) you are allowed to add and quotas on the memory usage. You can get started in a minute with this, no need to setup any database cluster and worry about its configuration, it is all taken care of.

You can use the managed version of RonDB available on hopsworks.ai. This sets up a RonDB cluster in your own AWS, Azure or GCP account using the Hopsworks managed software. This sets up a RonDB cluster provided a few details on the HW resources to use. These details can either be added through a web-based UI or using Terraform. The RonDB cluster is integrated with Hopsworks and can be used for both RonDB applications as well as for Hopsworks applications.

You can use the open source version and use the binary tarball and set it up yourself.

You can use the open source version and build and set it up yourself.

This is the commands you can use to retrieve the binary tarball:

# Download x86_64 on Linux
wget https://repo.hops.works/master/rondb-26.04.0-linux-glibc2.28-x86_64.tar.gz
# Download ARM64 on Linux
wget https://repo.hops.works/master/rondb-26.04.0-linux-glibc2.28-arm64_v8.tar.gz

These versions are also available as Docker containers at hub.docker.com under hopsworks/rondb. See https://hub.docker.com/r/hopsworks/rondb/tags for an up to date of which RonDB container images are available. These containers can be used to run RonDB in containers, in Hopsworks they are also used since version 4.0 as containers in the Hopsworks Kubernetes cluster.

The actions to build both x86_64 and ARM64 tarballs have now been fully automated.

Summary of changes in RonDB 26.04#

RonDB 26.04.0 is based on MySQL NDB Cluster 8.4.8 and RonDB 26.02.0.

RonDB 26.04.0 adds 7 improvements on top of RonDB 26.02 and adds 76 improvements on top of MySQL NDB Cluster 8.4.8.

RonDB 26.04.0 has 1 bug fix on top of RonDB 26.02.0.

RonDB 26.04 brings a couple of new interfaces to RonDB. It adds a new RonDB CLI, this can be used to query RonDB through MySQL, through the REST API and through the Rondis API (Redis interface). The RonDB CLI also supports running a set of benchmarks against all of these new interfaces.

It also expands the RonDB REST API. RonDB 22.10 added a batch key lookup endpoint for both databases and feature stores. RonDB 25.10 added a scan endpoint and now RonDB 26.04 adds support for a batchdelete endpoint and a batchwrite endpoint that can be used to update, insert and write rows.

A new version of the REST API 0.2.0 can be used that will return any error messages in JSON format.

RonDB 26.04 updates the Rondis API (Redis) to a supported feature. Parts of the RonDB CLI exists also in older versions of RonDB, but it is only in RonDB 26.04 it is a supported feature.

New features in 26.04 include support for up to 4096 columns and also a bit larger rows. RonDB 24.10 added a new feature with support for rate limits and quotas per database. RonDB 26.04 adds support for rate limits per user. RonSQL has been optimised a bit as well.

Test environment#

RonDB uses four different ways of testing. MTR is a functional test framework built using SQL statements to test RonDB.

The Autotest framework is specifically designed to test RonDB using the NDB API. The Autotest is mainly focused on testing high availability features and performs thousands of restarts using error injection as part of a full test suite run.

Benchmark testing ensures that we maintain the throughput and latency that is unique to RonDB. The benchmark suites used are integrated into the RonDB binary tarball making it very straightforward to run benchmarks for RonDB.

Finally we also test RonDB in the Hopsworks environment where we perform both normal actions as well as many actions to manage the RonDB clusters.

RonDB has a number of MTR tests that are executed as part of the build process to improve the performance of RonDB.

MTR testing#

RonDB has a functional test suite using the MTR (MySQL Test Run) that executes more than 500 RonDB specific test programs. In adition there are thousands of test cases for the MySQL functionality. MTR is executed on both Mac OS X and Linux.

We also have a special mode of MTR testing where we can run with different versions of RonDB in the same cluster to verify our support of online software upgrade.

Autotest#

RonDB is very focused on high availability. This is tested using a test infrastructure we call Autotest. It contains also many hundreds of test variants that takes around 36 hours to execute the full set. One test run with Autotest uses a specific configuration of RonDB. We execute multiple such configurations varying the number of data nodes, the replication factor and the thread and memory setup.

An important part of this testing framework is that it uses error injection. This means that we can test exactly what will happen if we crash in very specific situations, if we run out of memory at specific points in the code and various ways of changing the timing by inserting small sleeps in critical paths of the code.

During one full test run of Autotest, RonDB nodes are restarted thousands of times in all sorts of critical situations.

Autotest currently runs on Linux with a large variety of CPUs, Linux distributions and even on Windows using WSL 2 with Ubuntu.

Benchmark testing#

We test RonDB using the Sysbench test suite, DBT2 (an open source variant of TPC-C), flexAsynch (an internal key-value benchmark), DBT3 (an open source variant of TPC-H) and finally YCSB (Yahoo Cloud Serving Benchmark). We test the REST API server using benchmark programs written in Go and Feature Store REST API server is benchmarked using a tool called Locust that can be used to test various application variants. This tool is heavily used to benchmark application scenarios required by Hopsworks customers.

Dydra, a community user of RonDB implements a graph database supporting SPARQL on top of RonDB using a Common Lisp NDB API. They also have a set of benchmarks to verify the performance of RonDB in their application.

The focus is on testing RonDBs LATS capabilities (low Latency, high Availability, high Throughput and scalable Storage).

Hopsworks testing#

Finally we also execute tests in Hopsworks to ensure that it works with HopsFS, the distributed file system built on top of RonDB, and HSFS, the Feature Store designed on top of RonDB, and together with all other use cases of RonDB in the Hopsworks framework.

Improvements#

More columns#

Previously RonDB was limited to 512 columns per table. Now it supports 4096 columns per table which is also the limit in MySQL. It also supports larger rows, but the rows is still consisting of a fixed part, an in-memory variable sized part and a disk-based variable sized part. The limits of the sizes of these parts are still the same.

User rate limits#

It is now possible to limit the CPU usage per user. Accesses through MySQL will use the username, accesses through the REST API will use a concatenation of the project name and the username of the project user. As with rate limits and quotas the management of those are handled through the MGM client or MGM API.

A new RonDB CLI for interaction with MySQL, REST API and Rondis#

A new batchdelete and batchwrite endpoint for the REST server#

Bug Fixes#