[Zope-Annce] ZODB 3.2 alpha 1 released

Jeremy Hylton jeremy@alum.mit.edu
Fri, 17 Jan 2003 16:19:24 -0500


I'm pleased to announce the release of ZODB 3.2 alpha 1.  This release
includes many new features, some of them still a little experimental.
You'll find a faster ZEO server with a simpler command-line script to
run it.  There's also a new configuration package, called ZConfig,
which will eventually be included in Zope, too.  In keeping with 3.x
releases, some obscure BTrees bugs have been fixed.

I expect there will be another alpha release as we refine the
experimental features and finish other proposed new features.  See 
the release plan in the ZODB Wiki at http://www.zope.org/Wikis/ZODB.

You can download a source release and Windows installers from
http://www.zope.org/Products/StandaloneZODB

I've included the most recent entries from NEWS.txt below.

Jeremy


What's new in ZODB3 3.2 alpha 1
===============================
Release date: 17-Jan-2003

Most of the changes in this release are performance and stability
improvements to ZEO.  A major packaging change is that there won't be
a separate ZEO release.  The new ZConfig is a noteworthy addtion (see
below).

ZODB
----

An experimental new transaction API was added.  The Connection class
has a new method, setLocalTransaction().  ZODB applications can call
this method to bind transactions to connections rather than threads.
This is especially useful for GUI applications, which often have only
one thread but multiple independent activities within that thread
(generally one per window).  Thanks to Christian Reis for championing
this feature.

Applications that take advantage of this feature should not use the
get_transaction() function.  Until now, ZODB itself sometimes assumed
get_transaction() was the only way to get the transaction.  Minor
corrections have been added.  The ZODB test suite, on the other hand,
can continue to use get_transaction(), since it is free to assume that
transactions are bound to threads.

ZEO
---

There is a new recommended script for starting a storage server.  We
recommend using ZEO/runzeo.py instead of ZEO/start.py.  The start.py
script is still available in this release, but it will no longer be
maintained and will eventually be removed.

There is a new zdaemon implementation.  This version is a separate
script that runs an arbitrary daemon.  To run the ZEO server as a
daemon, you would run "zdaemon.py runzeo.py".  There is also a simple
shell, zdctl.py, that can be used to manage a daemon.  Try
"zdctl.py -p runzeo.py".

There is a new version of the ZEO protocol in this release and a first
stab at protocol negotiation.  (It's a first stab because the protocol
checking supporting in ZODB 3.1 was too primitive to support anything
better.)  A ZODB 3.2 ZEO client can talk to an old server, but a ZODB
3.2 server can't talk to an old client.  It's safe to upgrade all the
clients first and upgrade the server last.  The ZEO client cache
format changed, so you'll need to delete persistent caches before
restarting clients.

The ZEO cache verification protocol was revised to require many fewer
messages in cases where a client or server restarts quickly.  

The performance of full cache verification has improved dramatically.
XXX Get measurements from Jim -- somewhere in 2x-5x recall.  The
implementation was fixed to use the very-fast getSerial() method on
the storage instead of the comparatively slow load().

The ZEO server has an optional timeout feature that will abort a
connection that does not commit within a certain amount of time.  The
timeout works by closing the socket the client is using, causing both
client and server to abort the transaction and continue.  This is a
drastic step, but can be useful to prevent a hung client or other bug
from blocking a server indefinitely.

A bug was fixed in the ZEO protocol that allowed clients to read stale
cache data while cache verification was being performed.  The fixed
version prevents the client from using the storage until after
verification completes.

The ZEO server has an experimental monitoring interface that reports
usage statistics for the storage server including number of connected
clients and number of transactions active and committed.  It can be
enabled by passing the -m flag to runsvr.py.

The ZEO ClientStorage no longer supports the environment variables
CLIENT_HOME, INSTANCE_HOME, or ZEO_CLIENT.

The ZEO1 package is still included with this release, but there is no
longer an option to install it.

BTrees
------

The BTrees package now has a check module that inspects a BTree to
check internal invariants.  Bugs in older versions of the code code
leave a BTree in an inconsistent state.  Calling BTrees.check.check()
on a BTree object should verify its consistency.  (See the NEWS
section for 3.1 beta 1 below to for the old BTrees bugs.)

Fixed a rare conflict resolution problem in the BTrees that could
cause an segfault when the conflict resolution resulted in any
empty bucket.

Installation
------------

The distutils setup now installs several Python scripts.  The
runzeo.py and zdaemon.py scripts mentioned above and several fsXXX.py
scripts from the Tools directory.

The test.py script does not run all the ZEO tests by default, because
the ZEO tests take a long time to run.  Use --all to run all the
tests.  Otherwise a subset of the tests, mostly using MappingStorage,
are run.

Storages
--------

There are two new storages based on Sleepycat's BerkeleyDB in the
BDBStorage package.  Barry will have to write more here, because I
don't know how different they are from the old bsddb3Storage
storages.  See Doc/BDBStorage.txt for more information.

It now takes less time to open an existing FileStorage.  The
FileStorage uses a BTree-based index that is faster to pickle and
unpickle.  It also saves the index periodically so that subsequent
opens will go fast even if the storage was not closed cleanly.

Misc
----

The new ZConfig package, which will be used by Zope and ZODB, is
included.  ZConfig provides a configuration syntax, similar to
Apache's syntax.  The package can be used to configure the ZEO server
and ZODB databases.  See the module ZODB.config for functions to open
the database from configuration.  See ZConfig/doc for more info.

The zLOG package now uses the logging package by Vinay Sajip, which
will be included in Python 2.3.

The Sync extension was removed from ExtensionClass, because it was not
used by ZODB.