Recommended version for new deployment (6.3.24 vs 7.0 vs 7.1rc)

Using FoundationDB
1

What version do experts recommend for a new small deployment today?

My undestanding is that

  • 6.3.24 is the stable old version.
  • 7.0 is not officially released (no binaries) and quickly superseded by 7.1
  • 7.1-rc1 is released with binaries and 5000+ commits above 6.3

So my questions are

  • Is 7.0 or 7.1 used in live production yet?
  • If 6.3.24 is recommended, will there be an easy upgrade path (install new binary, restart fdbmonitor) to the next stable version (7.x).
  • I see pretty big features (multi-tenancy) committed right now, is it the plan to wait for it to become stable and only then release a stable 7.x version in the months to come?
2 Likes
2

Yes, 6.3.24 is the latest stable version used in production and is recommended. Both 7.0 and 7.1 are not used in production yet. 6.3 will be able to be upgraded to either 7.0 or 7.1.

The major features of 7.0 include: split proxy into GRV and commit proxy roles; redwood storage engine; and testing storage server (TSS).

7.1 will introduce RocksDB storage engine and version vector.

Multi-tenancy will be released after 7.1. Hope this clarifies some confusion about the upcoming release versions.

1 Like
3

@jzhou Would you know which release would get GetMappedRange feature?

4

7.1 release will have it.

2 Likes
5

@rajivr I wrote GetMappedRange. Thanks for your interest! 7.1.0-rc2 will soon be released and include it. It’s an experimental feature so things may not be well documented. Please feel free to let me know (either as a new post, or just private message me) your use case and if there is anything I can help.

1 Like
6

For someone who is writing language bindings, a data layer and slowly preparing to move an entire application over to FoundationDB (with a time perspective of several months), would it be reasonable to assume that going with 7.1-rc releases would be the way to go today?

I have working code written for 6.2 and would like to resume this work.

Also, is there a changelog, release notes document, or anything similar? I am trying to figure out what has been added (version vector?) and having a hard time finding this information.

7

There are changelogs for 7.0 in the source: foundationdb/release-notes-700.rst at main · apple/foundationdb · GitHub

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8

Indeed! Thanks! It never occurred to me to look in a “sphinx” directory for those, and the toplevel README doesn’t mention them.

9

For now 7.1.0 has already been released, but 7.0.0 is marked as pre-release. Does Apple have any plans of maintaining 7.0.0?

10

Hi Jingyu,
7.1 is officially release in github. is it production ready? how to enable redwood engine? I don’t see configure cmd like “configure new ssd-redwoodxxx”?

11

Zhongyan, 7.1 is cut officially, and we are starting to test the release. So no, it’s not production ready yet. We’ll announce when a 7.1 release is production ready.

The redwood storage engine type is called “ssd-redwood-1-experimental”, which should be recognized in the configure command.

1 Like
12

Thank you Jingyu. Just a curious question: how about 7.0, will it be skipped for production release?

13

Although there are no binaries posted right now, Snowflake is running 7.0.0 on all of our production clusters.

So it is a stable release, just the release artifacts were not uploaded to the website. I just removed the pre-release tag from github to reflect this.

14

Thank you Evan. Is 7.0 used in Snowflake the same with branch release-7.0 in github? I mean do you have some customized commits not yet synced with public branch?