* If universal compaction is used and options.num_levels > 1, compact files are tried to be stored in none-L0 with smaller files based on options.target_file_size_base. The limitation of DB size when using universal compaction is greatly mitigated by using more levels. You can set num_levels = 1 to make universal compaction behave as before. If you set num_levels > 1 and want to roll back to a previous version, you need to compact all files to a big file in level 0 (by setting target_file_size_base to be large and CompactRange(<cf_handle>, nullptr, nullptr, true, 0) and reopen the DB with the same version to rewrite the manifest, and then you can open it using previous releases.
* TablePropertiesCollector::AddUserKey() is added to replace TablePropertiesCollector::Add(). AddUserKey() exposes key type, sequence number and file size up to now to users.
* GetThreadStatus() is now able to report detailed thread status, including:
- Thread Operation including flush and compaction.
- The stage of the current thread operation.
- The elapsed time in micros since the current thread operation started.
More information can be found in include/rocksdb/thread_status.h. In addition, when running db_bench with --thread_status_per_interval, db_bench will also report thread status periodically.
* Changed the LRU caching algorithm so that referenced blocks (by iterators) are never evicted. This change made parameter removeScanCountLimit obsolete. Because of that NewLRUCache doesn't take three arguments anymore. table_cache_remove_scan_limit option is also removed
* By default we now optimize the compilation for the compilation platform (using -march=native). If you want to build portable binary, use 'PORTABLE=1' before the make command.
* Added BlockBasedTableOptions.format_version option, which allows user to specify which version of block based table he wants. As a general guidline, newer versions have more features, but might not be readable by older versions of RocksDB.
* Added new block based table format (version 2), which you can enable by setting BlockBasedTableOptions.format_version = 2. This format changes how we encode size information in compressed blocks and should help with memory allocations if you're using Zlib or BZip2 compressions.
* Block based table remembers whether a whole key or prefix based bloom filter is supported in SST files. Do a sanity check when reading the file with users' configuration.
* options.level_compaction_dynamic_level_bytes, a feature to allow RocksDB to pick dynamic base of bytes for levels. With this feature turned on, we will automatically adjust max bytes for each level. The goal of this feature is to have lower bound on size amplification. For more details, see comments in options.h.
* MemEnv is now available in RocksJava via RocksMemEnv class.
* lz4 compression is now included in rocksjava static library when running `make rocksdbjavastatic`.
* Overflowing a size_t when setting rocksdb options now throws an IllegalArgumentException, which removes the necessity for a developer to catch these Exceptions explicitly.
* Introduce 4 new convenient functions for converting Options from string: GetColumnFamilyOptionsFromMap(), GetColumnFamilyOptionsFromString(), GetDBOptionsFromMap(), GetDBOptionsFromString()
* When opening a DB, if options.max_background_compactions is larger than the existing low pri pool of options.env, it will enlarge it. Similarly, options.max_background_flushes is larger than the existing high pri pool of options.env, it will enlarge it.
* If you're using RocksDB on ARM platforms and you're using default bloom filter, there is a disk format change you need to be aware of. There are three steps you need to do when you convert to new release: 1. turn off filter policy, 2. compact the whole database, 3. turn on filter policy
* We have refactored our system of stalling writes. Any stall-related statistics' meanings are changed. Instead of per-write stall counts, we now count stalls per-epoch, where epochs are periods between flushes and compactions. You'll find more information in our Tuning Perf Guide once we release RocksDB 3.6.
* Move BlockBasedTable related options to BlockBasedTableOptions from Options. Change corresponding JNI interface. Options affected include:
no_block_cache, block_cache, block_cache_compressed, block_size, block_size_deviation, block_restart_interval, filter_policy, whole_key_filtering. filter_policy is changed to shared_ptr from a raw pointer.
* Remove deprecated options: disable_seek_compaction and db_stats_log_interval
* OptimizeForPointLookup() takes one parameter for block cache size. It now builds hash index, bloom filter, and block cache.
* Added iterate_upper_bound to define the extent upto which the forward iterator will return entries. This will prevent iterating over delete markers and overwritten entries for edge cases where you want to break out the iterator anyways. This may improve perfomance in case there are a large number of delete markers or overwritten entries.
* HashLinklist reduces performance outlier caused by skewed bucket by switching data in the bucket from linked list to skip list. Add parameter threshold_use_skiplist in NewHashLinkListRepFactory().
* RocksDB is now able to reclaim storage space more effectively during the compaction process. This is done by compensating the size of each deletion entry by the 2X average value size, which makes compaction to be triggerred by deletion entries more easily.
* Add TimeOut API to write. Now WriteOptions have a variable called timeout_hint_us. With timeout_hint_us set to non-zero, any write associated with this timeout_hint_us may be aborted when it runs longer than the specified timeout_hint_us, and it is guaranteed that any write completes earlier than the specified time-out will not be aborted due to the time-out condition.
* Add a rate_limiter option, which controls total throughput of flush and compaction. The throughput is specified in bytes/sec. Flush always has precedence over compaction when available bandwidth is constrained.
* We removed seek compaction as a concept from RocksDB because:
1) It makes more sense for spinning disk workloads, while RocksDB is primarily designed for flash and memory,
2) It added some complexity to the important code-paths,
3) None of our internal customers were really using it.
Because of that, Options::disable_seek_compaction is now obsolete. It is still a parameter in Options, so it does not break the build, but it does not have any effect. We plan to completely remove it at some point, so we ask users to please remove this option from your code base.
* Added new option BlockBasedTableOptions::hash_index_allow_collision. When enabled, prefix hash index for block-based table will not store prefix and allow hash collision, reducing memory consumption.
* PlainTable now supports a new key encoding: for keys of the same prefix, the prefix is only written once. It can be enabled through encoding_type paramter of NewPlainTableFactory()
* Add AdaptiveTableFactory, which is used to convert from a DB of PlainTable to BlockBasedTabe, or vise versa. It can be created using NewAdaptiveTableFactory()
* Hash index for block-based table will be materialized and reconstructed more efficiently. Previously hash index is constructed by scanning the whole table during every table open.
* Deprecated ReadOptions.prefix and ReadOptions.prefix_seek. Seek() defaults to prefix-based seek when Options.prefix_extractor is supplied. More detail is documented in https://github.com/facebook/rocksdb/wiki/Prefix-Seek-API-Changes
* Change default value of several options, including: paranoid_checks=true, max_open_files=5000, level0_slowdown_writes_trigger=20, level0_stop_writes_trigger=24, disable_seek_compaction=true, max_background_flushes=1 and allow_mmap_writes=false
* A new SST format "PlainTable" is added, which is optimized for memory-only workloads. It can be created through NewPlainTableFactory() or NewTotalOrderPlainTableFactory().
* A new mem table implementation hash linked list optimizing for the case that there are only few keys for each prefix, which can be created through NewHashLinkListRepFactory().
* Merge operator supports a new function PartialMergeMulti() to allow users to do partial merges against multiple operands.
* Now compaction filter has a V2 interface. It buffers the kv-pairs sharing the same key prefix, process them in batches, and return the batched results back to DB. The new interface uses a new structure CompactionFilterContext for the same purpose as CompactionFilter::Context in V1.
* Implemented [TailingIterator](https://github.com/facebook/rocksdb/wiki/Tailing-Iterator), a special type of iterator that
doesn't create a snapshot (can be used to read newly inserted data)
and is optimized for doing sequential reads.
* Added property block for table, which allows (1) a table to store
its metadata and (2) end user to collect and store properties they
are interested in.
* Enabled caching index and filter block in block cache (turned off by default).
* Supported error report when doing manual compaction.
* Supported additional Linux platform flavors and Mac OS.
* Put with `SliceParts` - Variant of `Put()` that gathers output like `writev(2)`
* Bug fixes and code refactor for compatibility with upcoming Column
Family feature.
### Performance Improvements
* Huge benchmark performance improvements by multiple efforts. For example, increase in readonly QPS from about 530k in 2.6 release to 1.1 million in 2.7 [1]
* Speeding up a way RocksDB deleted obsolete files - no longer listing the whole directory under a lock -- decrease in p99
* Use raw pointer instead of shared pointer for statistics: [5b825d](https://github.com/facebook/rocksdb/commit/5b825d6964e26ec3b4bb6faa708ebb1787f1d7bd) -- huge increase in performance -- shared pointers are slow
* Optimized locking for `Get()` -- [1fdb3f](https://github.com/facebook/rocksdb/commit/1fdb3f7dc60e96394e3e5b69a46ede5d67fb976c) -- 1.5x QPS increase for some workloads
* Implemented autovector, which allocates first N elements on stack. Most of vectors in RocksDB are small. Also, we never want to allocate heap objects while holding a mutex. -- [c01676e4](https://github.com/facebook/rocksdb/commit/c01676e46d3be08c3c140361ef1f5884f47d3b3c)
* Lots of efforts to move malloc, memcpy and IO outside of locks
