path: root/NEWS

WiredTiger release 2.1.2, 2014-03-27
------------------------------------

The WiredTiger 2.1.2 release contains performance enhancements and bug fixes.
Significant changes include:

Update the configuration settings for shared_cache to make the distinction
between cache_size and shared_cache less confusing. See upgrading
documentation for more information.

Various performance enhancements to improve the performance of checkpoints.

Fix a bug that could cause a hang with small caches under heavy load. [#894]

WiredTiger release 2.1.1, 2014-03-04
------------------------------------

The WiredTiger 2.1.1 release contains new features, performance enhancements
and bug fixes.  Significant changes include:

Fix a bug where a page could be marked clean when it contained uncommitted
changes.  This bug could cause undefined behavior in transaction rollback
under load.

Fix a bug with shared caches when rebalancing between connections.

Add a new public API to WiredTiger that provides the ability to parse
WiredTiger compatible configuration strings. See the upgrading documentation
for further information. [#873]

A number of performance enhancements to the LSM implementation, particularly
for long running workloads.

A number of performance enhancements and bug fixes to cache eviction code.

Add an option to use direct I/O when reading from checkpoints. To enabled
the functionality add "direct_io=[checkpoint]" to your wiredtiger_open
configuration string. [#847]


WiredTiger release 2.1.0, 2014-02-04
------------------------------------

The WiredTiger 2.1.0 release contains new features, performance enhancements
and bug fixes.  Significant changes include:

The WT_ITEM structure was changed so that the size field is a size_t rather
than a uint32_t.  See upgrading documentation for details.

A change to the compress_raw interface around repeating the call with more
records.  See upgrading documentation for details.

In LSM trees, the memory_page_max setting is ignored.  The effective setting
is double the chunk size. [#861][#859]

Add support for zlib compression. [#855] [#865]

Various enhancements to how WiredTiger generates tree structures in memory to
help maintain consistent performance as table size grows. [#851]

Add support for Levyx Inc Helium as an external data source in WiredTiger
[#849][#850]

Improve insert performance when a table contains many identical overflow
items.

Various performance enhancements to btree searches. [#838][#839][#840]

Add support for newer versions of autoconf up to 1.14. [#599][#841]

Improve multi-threaded throughput of durable log writes, including changing
the default wiredtiger_open transaction_sync configuration from dsync to
fsync, see the upgrading documentation for further information. [#831][#832]

In the Python and Java APIs, automatically close handles to prevent invalid
accesses by applications. [#649][#800][#830]

Various enhancements to the LSM merge algorithm, including improvements to how
files are selected for merging, and throttling based on whether merges are
keeping up (to limit write amplification).  Made the minimum number of chunks
chosen to merge configurable. [#817][#819][#822]


WiredTiger release 2.0.1, 2013-12-12
------------------------------------

The WiredTiger 2.0.1 release contains major new features, numerous performance
enhancements and bug fixes.

Significant changes include:

* WiredTiger now supports fine-grained durability via Write Ahead Logging (WAL).
  Logging is enabled with the "log=(enabled)" configuration string to
  wiredtiger_open. If the connection is not shut down cleanly and logging is
  enabled, WiredTiger will automatically run recovery the next time it is
  opened, rolling forward changes in the log until the last commit.
  [#605]

* Many enhancements to the LSM implementation to improve the throughput and
  reduce maximum operation latency including:
  - Algorithmic improvements when multiple merge threads are configured.
  - Improvements to bloom filter lookup speed.
  - Enhancements to internal cursor management, to reduce search overhead.
  - Prioritize switching to a new level 0 chunk in utility threads, to avoid
    application thread pauses.
  - More advanced logic in choosing when to create bloom filters.

* LSM specific WT_SESSION::create configuration option enhancements. Including:
  - Move existing options into their own group, and strip leading lsm_ prefix.
  - Add a new merge_max configuration option.
  - Update the default chunk_size to be 10MB.
  - Increase the default bloom filter bit and hash counts.
  - Clean up files left after interrupted merges.
  See the upgrading documentation for details.
  [#784, #785, #786, #802]

* WT_SESSION::compact can now be used to merge LSM trees into a small number
  of chunks on disk.
  [#792]

* Enhanced the Java API, so that when WiredTiger automatically closes a
  handle, the handle is automatically invalidated for the Java application.
  [#485]

* Add a script that can create an interactive web page to view statistics
  from a WiredTiger statistics log. Based on D3: http://d3js.org/

* Enhancements to the wtperf performance testing tool to add new features


WiredTiger release 1.6.6, 2013-11-19
------------------------------------

The WiredTiger 1.6.6 release is a bugfix and performance tuning release.

This release of WiredTiger contains a database format change. Database files
from previous releases will need to be upgraded.

A special note: the WiredTiger code base is now being regularly reviewed
using the Coverity Static Analysis Verification Engine.  We'd like to
thank Coverity for their on-going support of Open Source projects like
WiredTiger!

Significant changes include:

* Performance changes include: limiting operations done inside update
  serialization primitives, removing unnecessary memory barriers, replacing
  spinlocks with atomic instructions, padding structures to avoid false
  cache sharing, switching from per-file mutexes to per-page mutexes,
  pre-allocating structures to avoid memory allocation while holding
  mutexes, and using adaptive mutexes where available.
  [#707, #718, #719]

* A number of LSM stability and performance improvements: changes include
  better merge algorithms, reduced locking, and higher concurrency.

* A number of table compaction performance improvements, including changes
  allowing compaction to no longer read unnecessary file blocks into the
  cache, requires fewer passes over the file and support concurrent
  checkpoints and eviction.  This change required an underlying file
  format change, see the upgrading documentation for details.
  [#756, #761]

* WiredTiger statistics have been significantly improved:
  
  Statistics logging has been changed to aggregate information from all
  open handles.  [#709, #717]

  For performance reasons, statistics are now disabled by default, see
  the upgrading documentation for details.  [#715]

  Statistics configuration has been changed so the connection and cursor
  configuration are consistent, with matching changes to the "wt stat"
  command-line utility; see the upgrading documentation for details.

* Update WT_EVENT_HANDLER interface to contain a new "handle close"
  interface and to pass a WT_SESSION handle into all callbacks, see the
  upgrading documentation for details. [#649]

  Add timestamp, process ID and thread ID to messages generated via
  WT_EVENT_HANDLER interface. [#753]

* WiredTiger eviction improvements, supporting larger data-to-cache size
  ratios. [#754]

* Various fixes for handling overflow records. [#726, #743]

* Overflow records are no longer tracked during bulk-loads, significantly
  increasing bulk-load performance for some data sets.


WiredTiger release 1.6.5, 2013-10-09
------------------------------------

This is primarily a bugfix and performance tuning release. The main changes are:

* Change the default statistics_fast configuration from false to true.

* Change WT_CURSOR::insert to not hold a position. [#673]

* Disallow WT_SESSION::compact operations on LSM trees.

* The 'sync' setting to wiredtiger_open has been renamed 'checkpoint_sync'.

* Add a "metadata:" cursor type. [#660]

* Fix race in the cache's dirty byte tracking. [#635, #699]

* Fix a bug scanning through a memory-mapped file with overflow items. [#701]

* Use hardware checksum instructions when available. [#582, #702]

* Several bug fixes related to tracking active transaction IDs and detection of
  obsolete updates with high concurrency workloads. [#639, #643, #657, #683]

* Fix several bugs in LSM including races on shutdown and Bloom filter
  creation. [#686, #687, #688].

* Fix a bug in LSM where we were not including Bloom filter files in backups.
  [#684]

* Optimize the LSM throttle and merge algorithms. [#676]

* Make hot backups work concurrently with files being bulk-loaded. [#570, #653]

* Add full support for snapshot isolation to LSM: only switch LSM chunks if all
  changes are globally visible and detect conflicts between transactions across
  file switches. [#629]


WiredTiger release 1.6.4, 2013-08-20
------------------------------------

This is primarily a bugfix and performance tuning release. The main changes are:

* Make prefix compression of keys conditional on the amount of space saved.
  A database format change was required for this enhancement. See upgrading
  documentation for details. [#624]

* The default behavior of the wt utility's load command has been changed to
  overwrite existing data.

* Add a WT_SESSION.create prefix_compression_min configuration option with a
  default value of 4. [#624] and [#624]

* Fix "make install" of Python API. [#598]

* Require platform support for atomic read/write of 64 bit values. [#553]

* Support transaction semantics for custom data source implementations. Enhance
  Memrata data source to support transactions.

* Changes to the wtperf testing tool related to how configuration options are
  specified.

* Enhance cursor key/value memory management to be more efficient, consistent,
  and have stricter checking of inputs and outputs.

* Increase the likelihood of being able to evict hot pages. [#604]

* Reference on-page keys instead of copying them to allocated memory. This
  saves space in the cache and overhead when reading pages into cache.
  [#592] and [#600]

* Add a btree search optimization that skips matching prefixes. [#595]

* Turn off Huffman encoding for keys on row-store internal pages. [#592]

* Add concurrent logging infrastructure that will be used to support write
  ahead logging in a future release.


WiredTiger release 1.6.3, 2013-07-12
------------------------------------

This is a bugfix and performance tuning release. The main changes are:

* Change the default cursor overwrite configuration so that it is consistent
  across all data sources. This change may alter the behavior of existing
  applications without triggering any compilation or runtime warnings. See
  the upgrade documentation for details. [#512]

* Require platform support for 64 bit atomic operations. [#553]


WiredTiger release 1.6.2, 2013-06-18
------------------------------------

This is a bugfix and performance tuning release. The main changes are:

* Fix a race in the WiredTiger pseudo random number generator that was leading
  to poor distribution of numbers.

* Change the default compression configuration to "uncompressed".

* Fix a race between checkpoints and LSM that could result in a crash. [#543]

* Add an option to output version information at runtime. Configure by
  including "verbose=[version]" in the wiredtiger_open connection
  configuration string. [#564]

* Add a configurable prefix to error messages. [#527]

* Add two new extension APIs, one to return a transaction ID, one to return
  if a transaction ID is visible to the current transaction.

* Add standard metadata functions to the extension API and make extension data
  sources responsible for their own metadata entries.

* Add a new extension function __wt_ext_config_strget that returns the
  configuration value from a single string.


WiredTiger release 1.6.1, 2013-05-31
------------------------------------

This is a bugfix and performance tuning release. The main changes are:

* Fix the compress_raw API so that it uses platform independent types. See the
  upgrade guide for further information. [#561]

* Add an explicit enable setting to shared_cache configuration. See the
  upgrade guide for further information.

* Fix several bugs in hot backup, including race conditions between backup and
  table drop (and other schema level operations). [#556] [#557]

* Allow any data source type for indices as well as column groups. [#545]

* Preload btree internal pages into file system cache when opening a table.

* Change the default allocation size to 4KB so that DIRECT_IO with 4KB blocks
  works. [#547]

* Fix some bugs related to tracking the oldest active transaction. [#552]

* Fix a bug in the extension API when using multiple databases.

* Disallow named checkpoints on LSM trees - they aren't supported. [#546]

* Fix support for custom collators with LSM trees. [#544]

* Build fixes for gcc 4.1.2.

See the upgrade documentation for details of API changes that may require
altering existing applications.


WiredTiger release 1.6.0, 2013-05-16
------------------------------------

This release contains new features, bug fixes and performance improvements.
The significant changes are highlighted below:

* Fix a bug where configuring direct I/O could cause checksum errors at
  runtime.  NOTE: database file format change.  [#526]

* Fix a race that allowed checkpoints to be deleted while hot backups are
  running.  [#515]

* Scale to events per second in graphs generated from statistics log output.
  [#518]

* Changes to reduce the latency of LSM operations.

* Add a new terminate callback to extension interfaces that is called when the
  WiredTiger connection is closed.  [#530]

* Various optimizations and bug fixes to cache management and eviction code.

* Update various statistics.

* Fix a bug where using a combination of read-committed and snapshot
  transactions could result in inconsistent values being returned.  [#539]

* Fix a bug where using LSM trees with compression enabled could result in an
  invalid system call. [#535]

* Enhance statistics logging so that it can dump "lsm:" statistics.

See the upgrade documentation for information about database format changes
in this release.


WiredTiger release 1.5.3, 2013-04-26
------------------------------------

This release contains some major new features along with numerous bug fixes
and performance improvements. The significant changes are highlighted
below:

* Enhance the extension data source API to facilitate implementation of new
  data stores in WiredTiger.

* Add support for the STEC / Memrata KVS data source.

* Add a Berkeley DB data source via the WiredTiger extension API.

* Various enhancements to cache eviction management. Mostly to avoid stalls in
  application threads.

* Fixes to shared cache pool implementation, so resources are more
  aggressively reallocated.

* Add new statistics.

* Implement automatic insert throttling in LSM - enabled by default.

* Configuration strings are now case sensitive.

* Enhance LSM merge algorithms to be more efficient as trees grow very large.

See the upgrade documentation for details of API changes that may require
altering existing applications.


WiredTiger release 1.5.2, 2013-03-28
------------------------------------

This is a bugfix release. The main changes are:

[#493] Fix get_key/value in the Java API for complex cursors.

* Fix a leak in eviction detected by valgrind.

* Stop trying to cache the oldest reader: we only use it for eviction and only update it when required.

* Track cursor creation in the statistics (creating a cursor per operation isn't a good idea).


WiredTiger release 1.5.1, 2013-03-25
------------------------------------

This is a bugfix and performance tuning release. The main changes are:

* Fix several bugs in LSM:
 - the logic for setting the "no eviction" flag on LSM chunks was reversed,
   causing unnecessary eviction once the cache became full;
 - calling session.checkpoint while writing to an LSM tree could confuse
   the logic around switching to new chunks; and
 - fix a possible NULL pointer indirection when switching chunks.

* Make WT_ASSERT a no-op when not in DIAGNOSTIC mode.

* Panic if we find a block on the wrong list, that's not something we can
  recover from.

* If a page is reconciled (causing it's on-disk blocks to be freed and
  potentially recycled), and then a subsequent collapse of a stack of
  split-merge pages replaces that page with a page that has not yet been
  reconciled, we can potentially free the same blocks twice.  The fix is to
  clear the page's WT_REF.addr field at the time we free the blocks, so
  future reconciliations will ignore the original disk blocks.

* Fix a bug in the dump utility that allowed index URIs.

* Tweak merge to build better trees with random insert workloads.

* Don't use a stale value for the oldest reader transaction ID.

* Track the size of the WT_REF array in internal pages (including
  WT_ADDRs).  Also add an estimate of per-allocation overhead.

* Fix a bug where URIs containing absolute paths were not being parsed
  correctly.

* Add a RMW insert mode to wtbench.

[#427] Improve cleanup after a failed wiredtiger_open call.

[#484] Don't allow true/false values in config strings where integers are
       expected.

[#486] Move the cache full check for autocommit transactions out of the
       rollback path (since we don't reset cursors there), to after we
       close a cursor.

[#488] Fix an assertion failure if we try to do eviction without ever having done an update.


WiredTiger release 1.5.0, 2013-03-14
------------------------------------

This release contains some major new features along with numerous bug fixes
and performance improvements. The significant changes are highlighted
below:

* Add a Java API.

* Create a thread to do automatic checkpoints, configured by passing
  "checkpoint=(wait=X)" to wiredtiger_open.

* Add support for periodically logging statistics to a file and a tool to
  generate graphs based on those logs.  Configured by passing
  "statistics_log=(wait=X)" to wiredtiger_open.

* Several changes to minimize the impact of checkpoints on other threads.

* When reading from checkpoints, use mmap by default.

* Enhance eviction so that internal pages take up less space.

* Add maximum filesystem buffer cache settings to wiredtiger_open called
  "os_cache_max" and "os_cache_dirty_max".  After doing the specified
  amount of reads or writes, WiredTiger will call fadvise and/or
  sync_file_range to drop pages from the filesystem cache.  This is an
  alternative to direct I/O with less impact on performance.

* Make run-time statistics optional, defaulted to "off".

* Change how we detect if shared cache is used. It used to rely on a name,
  now it will be used if the shared_cache configuration option is included. 

* Add the ability to specify a per-connection reserved size for cache
  pools.  Ensure cache pool reconfiguration is honoured quickly.

* Rework hazard pointer coupling during cursor walks to be more efficient.

* Add a cache_eviction_walk statistic to track the pages we walk and a
  cache_eviction_force statistic to track the count of pages queued for
  forced eviction.

* Fixes to reduce the number of operations on shared data that were causing
  bottlenecks in read only workloads.

* Add streaming pack / unpack to the API.

* Add some basic reconciliation stats to the connection stats.

* In LSM, keep trying to switch if there is an error: it may be transient.

* Minor clean up and enhancement for the reconciliation statistics, add a
  set of compression statistics, both to the data-source statistics.

* Compaction cannot run at the same time as a checkpoint: the problem is
  that checkpoints review page reconciliation information and checkpoints
  update page reconciliation information.   Lock out checkpoints while
  compaction is running.


WiredTiger release 1.4.2, 2013-01-14
------------------------------------

[#387] Fast-path "S" and "u" formats in cursor.get_key and cursor.get_value.

[#407] Allow non-conflicting updates to complete concurrently.

[#418] Add code in to prioritize eviction of pages that are larger than a
certain threshold. This avoids taking a performance hit when a huge page
needs to be reconciled.  Add a new memory_max_page configuration option.

[#419] If a page splits, it potentially creates a merge-split internal page
and we potentially walk that page during fast-delete.  The WT_REF.addr field
doesn't point to a cell in that case and we'll drop core.

[#424] Add clarification wording for boolean configuration strings.

[#425] Perform checkpoints in the calling thread, don't block eviction: when
evicting in a file that is being checkpointed, only evict clean pages.  Also
Do compaction in the calling thread instead of interrupting the eviction
thread to do the work.

[#426] Fixes for automake 1.3.x.  Allow examples to run in parallel: give
each a unique home directory.

Make the tree build without HAVE_VERBOSE.

Fix some issues with LSM rename and add a Python test.

Track when cursors refer to memory returned by WiredTiger, copy it if
required before dropping hazard pointers that might be protecting it.

Verify shouldn't ever modify the file -- don't bother checking for dirty
pages, just discard everything.

When rolling forward to resolve key prefix compression, don't copy the key,
we only need a reference to it, should speed up tables with lots of key
prefix compression.

Requested changes for the WT_COMPRESSOR::compress_raw method API: pass in the
configured object's page size as a convenience, and if
WT_COMPRESSOR::pre_size is set, use it to determine the size of the
destination buffer, rather than using the object's page size as the maximum
needed.


WiredTiger release 1.4.1, 2012-12-12
------------------------------------

This is a bugfix, cleanup and performance tuning release. The significant
changes are highlighted below:

[215] Add a __wt_panic function that shuts down all of the WiredTiger APIs.
      Also add a new error return WT_PANIC which means there has been an error
      in the WiredTiger engine, and it should be restarted.

[409] Fix a bug populating column groups with complex schema. Also allow empty
      column lists in projection cursors.

[150] Add description of how to do index-only searches to the documentation.

[392] Move examples/c/ex_test_perf.c to bench/wtperf.

[322] Add support for statistics on schema-level objects i.e tables,
      column groups, indices. 

* Enhance statistics, including changing the name of some statistics.

* Fix a bug in the eviction server that could cause it to abort, leaving the
  system unusable.


WiredTiger release 1.4.0, 2012-12-03
------------------------------------

This release adds several major new features, a number of performance
improvements and bug fixes. The significant changes are outlined below:

New features and API changes:

[242] Track the percentage of cache that is dirty, trigger eviction to bound
      it. This can be used to bound how much data checkpoints write.

[324] Add support for WT_COMPRESS::compress_raw, which lets the compression
      routine select how many rows are included in each disk block.

[381] Add statistics to track read and write amplification (application data
      size versus I/O size)

* Add a trigger configuration option to WT_SESSION::compact API.

* Make WT_SESSION::create's checksum configuration 3-state: on, off, or
  uncompressed blocks only.

Bug fixes:

* Fix build issues on Solaris.

* Fix a bug calculating the generation of an LSM merge.

* Fix WiredTiger dump and load for tables.

* Fix a memory leak in checkpoints.

* Improve accuracy of cache memory tracking with overflow items.


WiredTiger release 1.3.8, 2012-11-22
------------------------------------

This release improves the performance of LSM trees, changes how statistics are
reported and adds a shared cache implementation:

New features and API changes:

[232] Add a "size of checkpoint" statistic.

* Add a shared cache pool implemention.  Manages a single cache among
  multiple databases within a process.

* Merge statistics from file and LSM sources into a "data source" statistic
  structure.  Rename and regroup some shared stastistics.  Add a helper to
  the Python API to lookup in a cursor in a simple expression.

* Add support for sub groups of options in configuration strings.

Performance tuning for LSM trees:

* Don't try to merge with a chunk that is much larger than a small chunk.

* After an LSM merge, fault in some pages before the new tree goes live to
  avoid stalling application threads.

* Don't automatically fail inserts if the write generation check fails:
  compare keys instead.

* Switch the LSM tree lock to a read/write lock, so cursors can read the
  state of the tree in parallel.

Bug fixes:

* Fix a bug where we could write past the end of a buffer after it was grown.


WiredTiger release 1.3.7, 2012-11-09
------------------------------------

This release fixes a bug and improves performance with Bloom filters:

* Drop any old Bloom filter before creating a new one -- we may have been
  interrupted in between creating it and updating the metadata.  Write the
  metadata after creating missing Bloom filters.

* Use a separate thread for creation of Bloom filters for the newest,
  unmerged LSM chunks.

* Changes to the ex_test_perf example: change the default configuration to
  4KB pages and disable prefix compression.  Change the "-i" command line
  option to be a simple count of records to insert.  Clean up error
  handling and add option to populate using multiple threads.

* Clarify the docs for the default buffer_alignment setting.


WiredTiger release 1.3.6, 2012-11-06
------------------------------------

This is a bugfix and performance tuning release. The changes are as follows:

* Rename the WiredTiger installed modules to libwiredtiger_XXX.  Don't install
  the nop and reverse collator modules.

* Replace test/format's bzip configuration string with compression, which can
  take one of four arguments (none, bzip, ext, snappy), change format to run
  snappy compression if the library is available.

* Rename the builtin block compressor names from "bzip2_compress" to "bzip2",
  and from "snappy_compress" to "snappy".

* Support multiple LSM merge threads with the "lsm_merge_threads" config key.
  Use IDs rather than array index to mark the start chunk in a merge, in case
  we race with another thread.

* Cache the hash values used for Bloom filter lookups, rather than hashing for
  each Bloom filter in an LSM tree.

* Only switch trees in an LSM cursor if the primary chunk is on disk.

* Add a per-btree cache priority, currently only used to make it more likely
  for Bloom filter pages to stay in cache.

* Only evict pages with read generations in the bottom quarter of the range we
  see.  Fix a 32-bit wrapping bug in assigning read generations.

* For update-only LSM cursors, only open a cursor in the primary chunk.

* LSM: Report errors from the checkpoint thread.

* LSM: only save a Bloom URI in the metadata after it is successfully created.

* LSM: Create missing Bloom filters when reading from an LSM tree if
  "lsm_bloom_newest"is set.

* LSM: Include all of the chosen chunks in a merge.  Only pin the current chunk
  in an LSM cursor if it is writeable.


WiredTiger release 1.3.5, 2012-10-26
------------------------------------

This is a bugfix and performance tuning release. The changes are as follows:

[#370] Document that applications are responsible for figuring out their
       upgrade path if they might swap out compression engines.

[#371] When a single session was used to reconcile multiple btrees, one of
       which had dictionaries configured and one of which didn't, we failed to
       clear the dictionary when starting page reconciliation.   Be consistent,
       never use anything other than the btree handle's configuration to decide
       if we're using a dictionary in a reconcilation run.

[#372] Fix several potential integer overflow bugs.

[#373] Fix a bug where calls that performed an operation on multiple objects
       (such as creating a table that implicitly creates a column group)
       could leave the metadata incomplete if a process exited without
       calling `WT_CONNECTION::close`.
       Hold the schema lock while opening tables. Fixes the error "cannot be
       opened until all column groups are created" message when create calls
       race with open_cursor.

[#374] Fix a race that caused crashes when using the Python API with
       multi-threaded code.

[#375] Fix a bug in __wt_cond_wait - so that it returns after timeout expires.

* Protect the list of LSM trees with the schema lock to avoid races during
  create.

* Update ex_test_perf to output statistics during populate and improve timing
  accuracy.

* Skew eviction in favor of leaf pages - which improves read-only performance
  for large LSM trees.

* Hold the LSM tree lock while gathering statistics.

* Fix a bug in bulk load of bitmap files.

* Fix a related bug in the bloom code that uses bitmap stores.

* Don't attempt to drop the first chunk of an LSM tree before creating it.

* Instead of entering a fake key cell after the last cell on the page just
  in case the page ends with a key cell which has no value, use the end of
  the page to detect that case.

* Cache cursor key/value formats in Python, to save a native call from every
  get_key/value.

* Don't sync the directory after open if the global "sync" flag is false.

* Fix a race for LSM trees that could happen if two threads race to open a
  cursor and drop the LSM tree.

WiredTiger release 1.3.4, 2012-10-19
------------------------------------

This release includes several important new features, including:

* support for online compaction of files;
* support for tables, column groups and indices that use LSM trees for
  storage; and
* improved statistics and configuration for LSM trees and Bloom filters.

In addition, there are some significant performance improvements and bug
fixes.  The full list of changes is:

[#248]	Add support for online compaction.

[#310]	Fixed a bug where overflow blocks could be accessed by a
	long-running reader after they had been freed in a checkpoint.

[#358]	Allocate checkpoint blocks from the live system's list of available
	blocks rather than always extending the file.

[#361]	Sync the directory after creating a file: this is apparently
	required for durability on Linux, according to the Linux fsync man
	page.

[#362]	Don't check if a page is on the avail or discard lists if we're
	salvaging the file, that is okay.

[#363]	Remove obsolete code dealing with forced eviction.

[#366]	Fake checkpoints may have the delete flag set, ignore them when
	rolling checkpoints forward.

[#367]	All metadata reads should ignore the application's transactional
	context.

[#369]	Support LSM as a data source for tables, column groups and indices.

* Add tuning options for LSM bloom filters, including controlling whether
  the oldest level in the tree has a Bloom filter, whether newly-created
  (level 0) files have Bloom filters, and passing arbitrary file
  configuration for Bloom filters.

* Add a merge generation to LSM chunks.  Add a statistic that reports the
  highest merge generation in a tree.

* Add a new LSM statistic tracking searches that could benefit from bloom
  filters.

* Enable LSM statistics in the "wt stat" utility.

* Interrupt LSM merge operations, rather than waiting on close.

* Wait for a while before looking for LSM major merges, in case merges
  catch up with inserts.

* Fix LSM index searches.  The main issue was LSM search_near was not
  always returning the closest key to the search key, which calling code
  expects.  It now tries hard to find the smallest cursor larger than the
  search key, and only if no larger record exists does it return the
  largest record smaller than the search key.

* Reset any old cursor position before an LSM search.  This limits hazard
  references in an LSM search to a single chunk.

* Fix a memory leak in an error path in Bloom filters.

* Tweak the search loops in hazard_{set,clear} in favor of
  last-in-first-out ordering.

* If there are many files open, some hotter than others, walk more files
  looking for pages to evict.

* Don't stop evicting until we reach the target, have eviction wake up
  periodically regardless of whether the application signals it.  This
  latter requires a "timed condition wait" operation.

* Tweaks to file handle flags for out-of-cache read performance on Linux
  (disable readahead and access time updates).

* Replace the WT_SESSION::dumpfile method with configuration strings to
  WT_SESSION::verify.

* Fix a bug where we weren't skipping unnecessary default checkpoints
  because we weren't handling the generational number included in the
  internal checkpoint name.

* Add a "force" configuration flag to WT_SESSION::checkpoint, object
  compaction needs it because the work it wants done is done by the block
  manager.

* Make compact and checkpoint operate on a table's indices.

* When doing a page truncate, lock down the page before we unpack the
  on-page cell -- it's possible the page could be instantiated, modified
  and reconciled while we're sleeping, in which case the WT_REF.addr field
  would no longer point on-page.


WiredTiger release 1.3.3, 2012-10-11
------------------------------------

This is a bugfix and performance tuning release, primarily related to LSM
trees.  The changes are as follows:

[#350] Checkpoint the metadata after successful schema-level operations.
       Otherwise, if process exits without closing the connection or
       running a checkpoint, created objects exist but there is no record
       in the metadata.

[#351] Don't put checkpoint extent blocks on the available list, blocks on
       it are considered for truncation; they have to go on the "checkpoint
       available" list.

* Choose LSM merges based on a measure of efficiency (levels collapsed per
  record), rather than simply choosing a minor or a major merge.  Tweak the
  merge heuristic so we don't end up with runs of smaller chunks in the
  middle of the tree.

* Add a connection-wide flag to disable LSM merges.

* Don't create Bloom filters for the oldest chunk in the system.  Add the
  ability to disable Bloom filters entirely.

* Fix fast-path for bit values in WT_CURSOR::set_value.

* Clean up allocation of LSM chunk IDs.

* Update bloom_get so that it doesn't hold a cursor position.

* Respect the page size for fixed-length column stores, remembering there
  are 8 bits per byte.

* Support bulk loading a bitmap into a fixed-length column store, update
  Bloom filter code to use this.

* Add an example program, ex_test_perf, to demonstrate basic LSM usage.

* Add a new statistics cursor type "statistics:lsm".  Update ex_stat.c to
  demonstrate usage.

* Add a statistics_fast flag to file statistics cursors.  Update LSM
  statistics so that they aggregate some cache statistics.  Add ability to
  open a statistics cursor on a checkpoint.

* Walk a constant number of pages for LRU eviction.

* Move the cache full check to after an update operation completes, when it
  is no longer holding hazard references.  This improves behavior with
  small caches.


WiredTiger release 1.3.2, 2012-10-03
------------------------------------

This is a bugfix and performance tuning release, primarily related to LSM
trees.  The changes are as follows:

* Implement minor merges for LSM trees, prefer them to major merges.

* Update hazard references, so the active array grows as needed.  Change
  the default hazard_max to 1000.

* Abort transactions if the cache is so full that they cannot make
  progress.

* Fix a bug where verify could crash if an empty checkpoint exists.

* Make the maximum number of chunks for merges configurable, rather than
  deriving a value from the number of hazard references available.

* Switch to an atomic add to allocate transaction IDs.  This fixes a subtle
  race before where two threads could temporarily have the same ID in the
  global state table.  If one of the threads timed out and the other thread
  committed its transaction with that ID, the commit would not become
  visible immediately.  This could lead to deadlock errors in workloads
  that are logically conflict-free.

* Have auto-commit transactions retry deadlocks.  This requires that we
  keep the user's key and value in the cursor.

* Simplify the code handling updated records in variable-length
  column-store reconciliation.

* Never wait for eviction when holding the schema lock.  This avoids
  deadlocks between opening a column store file and taking a checkpoint.

* Take care with the loop termination when walking files for eviction.  We
  were making one extra call into __wt_tree_walk, which would leave a leaf
  page in the WT_REF_EVICT_WALK state, unable to be evicted.  In some
  workloads, including LSM loads, we could end up with many files all
  consisting of a single leaf page, none of which could be evicted.

* Pause updates when the cache is full.

* In files marked as "out of cache", don't wait for eviction when reading a
  page.

* Fix the record count calculation for minor merges.  This was leading to
  no Bloom filter being created for minor merges after running for some
  time, leading to merges taking increasingly long to complete.

* Only sleep in the LSM checkpoint thread if no work is done.

* Add sanity check of cache size to LSM open.

[#338] Create fake checkpoints until an object is modified, so that a
       checkpoint between the cursor create and the bulk load doesn't make
       it impossible to do a bulk-load on the cursor.


WiredTiger release 1.3.1, 2012-09-25
------------------------------------

This is a bugfix release, primarily related to LSM trees.  The changes are
as follows:

[#309] Implement auto-commit of transactions at the API.  As well as
       ensuring the atomicity of complex operations, this change simplified
       code that simulated auto-commit internally and fixed a number of
       bugs.

[#321] Bulk-cursors no longer block checkpoints.  We can't write files that
       are being bulk-loaded, so change checkpoint to create checkpoints in
       the metadata that, if accessed, look like empty files.

       Tighten down the requirements for bulk-load, the only thing that can
       be bulk-loaded now is a newly created tree, not any empty file.

[#329] Add dictionary support to variable-length column store objects.
       Support large row-store reconciliation dictionaries: add a skiplist
       as the indexing mechanism.

[#333] Fix a leak of the in-memory transaction log structure and the LSM
       data source handle.

[#334] Fix a memory leak where a page's replacement address wasn't being
       freed.

* Check that LSM trees are not configured as column stores.

* Fix a race when starting the LSM worker thread. It was possible for the
  thread to exit immediately if it started fast enough.

* Two fixes for LSM, one to ensure that cursors read from a checkpoint if
  one is available. The other to reduce the number of empty chunks that can
  be created initially.

* Fix a bug that disabled bloom filters.

* The configure script checks for Python support in SWIG.

* If a drop operation fails to acquire all of the handle locks it needs,
  make sure it releases the primary handle lock.

* Fix a number of other minor bugs and memory leaks.


WiredTiger release 1.3.0, 2012-09-17
------------------------------------

This release contains a number of major new features, including:

* support for LSM trees with Bloom filters;
* support for hot backups; and
* support for fast truncation of files.

In addition, there are some critical bug fixes.  We recommend that all users
upgrade.  Here is the full list of changes:

[#143] Implement random record lookups.

[#168] Add support for LSM trees.

[#168] Add support for Bloom filters in LSM trees.

[#198] Handle page-generation wraparound.

[#236] Implement hot backups.

[#244] Index cursors for column-store objects may not be created using the
       record number as the index key.

[#247] Add a fast-path for WT_SESSION::truncate that avoids reading most
       data to be deleted.

[#259] Performance hack for cursor open: don't parse the configuration
       strings for a default value if the application didn't specify a
       configuration string.

[#262] Disable dump on child cursors: only the top-level cursor is wrapped
       in a dump cursor.

[#266] Deal with new / dropped indices in __wt_schema_open_index. 

[#269] Checkpoint handles must not be open when they are overwritten. 

[#271] Add support for a reserved checkpoint name "WiredTigerCheckpoint"
       that opens the object's last checkpoint.

[#271] Add the ability to access unnamed checkpoints.

[#274] Change cursor.equals to return a standard error value and store the
       cursor equality result in a separate argument.

[#275] If exclusive handle is required for an operation and it is not
       available, fail immediately: don't block. 

[#276] Fix methods that return integer parameters from Python.  This
       includes cursor.equals and cursor.search_near. 

[#277] Acquire the schema lock when creating the metadata file.  We're
       single-threaded, so it isn't protecting against anything, but the
       handle management code expects to have the schema lock. 

[#279] Some optimizations for __wt_config_gets_defno.  Specifically, if
       we're dealing with a simple stack of config strings, just parse the
       application string rather than the full list of defaults. 

[#279] Split the description string into a set of structures, to reduce the
       number of string comparisons and manipulation that's required.

[#282] Remove the cursor.reconfigure method, and replace it with
       documentation showing how to "reconfigure" cursors using the
       session.open_cursor method to duplicate them with different
       configuration strings.

[#284] Fix for a hazard reference race, where page eviction races with the
       creation of the hazard reference, we have to check the pointer
       itself as well as the state of the pointer.

[#285] We can clear the tree's modified flag on checkpoint, as long as the
       checkpoint writes all modifications.   Clear the tree's modified
       flag before we start the checkpoint, but reset it as necessary if
       reconciliation is unable to write all of the changes in a page.

[#287] Fix __wt_config_check to handle overlapping config values correctly.

[#289] Add support for read-committed isolation, make it the default.  Add
       a session-level "isolation" setting.

[#294] If txn_commit fails, document the transaction was rolled-back.

[#295] Expand the documentation on using cursors without explicit
       transactions. 

[#300] Include all changes whenever closing a file, don't check for
       visibility.  If updates are skipped while evicting a page, give up. 

[#305] Have "wt dump" fail more gracefully if the object doesn't exist.

[#310] When freeing a tracked address in reconcilation, clear it to avoid
       freeing the same address again on error. 

[#314] Replace cursor.equals with cursor.compare

[#319] Clear the bulk_load_ok flag when closing handles. 


* Add an "ancient transaction" statistic so we can find out if they're
  actually occurring in the field.

* Add an "was object ever modified" flag to the btree handle, and use it to
  avoid writing read-only objects during internal checkpoints, issue

* Add per-connection statistics counters for transaction checkpoint, begin,
  commit and rollback.  Add per-btree statistics counters for update
  conflicts.

* Another fixed-length column-store implicit record fix: if the earliest
  row in the object is row 10, and it's on an append list, we still must
  return rows 1-9, they've been implicitly created.

* Bulk cursors: disallow cursor.{equals,next,prev,reset,search,
  search_near,update,remove}; only close and insert are supported.

* Change session.truncate to support any cursor position for range
  truncation, not just keys that are known to exist.

* Checkpoint has to flush the metadata file, but only after it's flushed
  all of the other files.

* Discard obsolete WT_UPDATE structures during updates.

* Document that duplicated cursors are positioned at the same point as the
  cursor that was duplicated.

* Fix a (very unlikely) deadlock at startup, if an application issues a
  checkpoint before the eviction server has managed to open its sesssion.

* Fix a core dump if we verify a file that's corrupted such that we are
  unable to load any checkpoints at all, and the per-checkpoint bit map is
  never set.

* If a page selected for eviction cannot be freed because it has some
  recent updates, try instead to free memory by trimming old updates.

* If a thread fails to evict a page, try to bump its snapshot.  This avoids
  the common case of read-committed threads getting stuck because one
  thread falls behind (e.g., because we can't evict during a checkpoint).

* If an exclusive table create fails, return EEXIST.

* If we try to remove a file that doesn't exist, don't complain, return
  success.

* If we're repeatedly taking a checkpoint with the same name, skip the work
  for read-only objects.

* Instead of flagging the empty tree's leaf page empty as part of creating
  an empty tree in memory, set the page as modified (to force
  reconciliation); if the leaf page is still empty at that time, then we'll
  figure it out during that reconciliation.  This fixes a memory leak where
  the leaf page of a empty tree wasn't being freed.

* It's not unreasonable to open a cursor on a non-existent table, don't
  complain, just return not-found.

* Move dist/RELEASE to the top level of the tree.

* Optimization: don't repeatedly look up btree handles for schema
  operations.

* Return keys from all operations: don't keep pointing to the application's
  key.

* Update btree usage of 64 bitstring implementation, so it's cleaner.

* Update the bitstring implementation to use 64 bit length strings.

* Updates performed without an active transaction should become visible
  with the current transaction ID.

* Upgrade to doxygen 1.8.x

* Use a real snapshot transaction for checkpoints.  Otherwise, the snapshot
  can be updated in between checkpointing multiple files (when updating the
  metadata).


WiredTiger release 1.2.2, 2012-06-20
------------------------------------

This is a bugfix release.  The changes are as follows:

* Defer making free pages available until the end of a checkpoint, in case
  there is a failure after processing some files.

* When checking the value of the "isolation" key, don't assume it is NUL
  terminated.  This bug could cause transactions to run with incorrect
  isolation.

* Fix two bugs with snapshot isolation:

  1. reset the isolation level when the transaction completes;
  2. when checking visibility, check item's ID against the maximum snapshot ID
     (not the transaction's ID).


WiredTiger release 1.2.1, 2012-06-15
------------------------------------

This is a bugfix release.  The changes are as follows:

* Avoid a deadlock between eviction and checkpoint on the connection spinlock.

* Allocate "desc" buffers in heap memory so that they are correctly aligned
  (fixes direct_io support on Linux).

* Initialize the snapshot-avail list after cleaning it out, else we'll try and
  print a NULL pointer in VERBOSE mode.


WiredTiger release 1.2.0, 2012-06-04
------------------------------------

This release contains many bugfixes and improvements.  The major changes are:

[#138]	Add support for transactions with coarse-grained durability.
	Transactions provide atomicity guarantees and rollback, and uncommitted
	changes are never written to disk.  There is no on-disk log, so
	committed changes only become durable when the next checkpoint
	completes.  Checkpoints are implemented by creating
	transactionally-consistent snapshots within data files.

[#156]	Fully support operations that make schema changes with multiple
	sessions open concurrently.

[#159]	Disable internal page key suffix compression if a custom collator is
	configured.  This avoids issues with collators that require complete
	keys.

[#167]	Add support for durable snapshots within files.  While a snapshot is
	active, the pages used by the snapshot will not be overwritten.  If a
	file is accessed after a crash or application exit without calling
	WT_CONNECTION::close, any changes made after the last snapshot will be
	silently ignored.

[#214, #216]
	Fixes for forcing eviction with small caches.

WiredTiger release 1.1.5, 2012-04-26
------------------------------------

Don't update a WT_REF after it has been unlocked.

Add an operation to set a flag atomically, use it to avoid racing on page flags.

Fix a race between sync and reading that could cause a segfault.


WiredTiger release 1.1.4, 2012-04-16
------------------------------------

Check the versions of autoconf, automake and libtool to avoid failures when
trying to build from the github tree with versions that are too old.

[#191] Create the schema table as part of creating the environment so that
       application threads don't race trying to create it later.

[#193] Split-merge pages have to be reconciled to mark their parents dirty

[#194] The dump utility should only output configuration that can be passed to
       WT_SESSION::create.

Eviction fixes for out-of-cache update workloads:

* Fix an unlikely bug where the EVICT_LRU flag was cleared when a page in
  the LRU queue was overwritten with itself during a walk.  This led to an
  assertion failure when the page was later evicted.

* Clear all unused eviction queue entries while holding the lru_lock.

* Split WT_PAGE->flags so that there is no possibility of racing:
  (1) Move WT_PAGE_REC_* flags into WT_PAGE_MODIFY;
  (2) Use atomic operations to set and clear the remaining (2) page flags.

Move the test/format threads setting into the CONFIG file.


WiredTiger release 1.1.3, 2012-04-04
------------------------------------

Fix the "exclusive" config for WT_SESSION::create. [#181]
1. Make it work for files within a single session.
2. Make it work for files across sessions.
3. Make other data sources consistent with files.

Fix an eviction bug introduced into 1.1.2: when evicting a page with children,
remove the children from the LRU eviction queue.  Reduce the impact of clearing
a page from the LRU queue by marking pages on the queue with a flag
(WT_PAGE_EVICT_LRU).  

During an eviction walk, pin pages up to the root so there is no need to spin
when attempting to lock a parent page.  Use the EVICT_LRU page flag to avoid
putting a page on the LRU queue multiple times.

Layer dump cursors on top of any cursor type.

Add a section on replacing the default system memory allocator to the tuning
page.

Typo in usage method for "wt write".

Don't report range errors for config values that aren't well-formed integers.


WiredTiger release 1.1.2, 2012-03-20
------------------------------------

Add public-domain copyright notices to the extension code.

test/format can now run multi-threaded, fixed two bugs it found:
(1) When iterating backwards through a skiplist, we could race with an insert.
(2) If eviction fails for a page, we have to assume that eviction has unlocked
    the reference.

Scan row-store leaf pages twice when reading to reduce the overhead of the
index array.

Eviction race fixes:
(1) Call __rec_review with WT_REFs: don't look at the page until we've checked
    the state.
(2) Clear the eviction point if we hit it when discarding a child page, not
    just the parent.

Eviction tuning changes, particularly for read-only, out-of-cache workloads.

Only notify the eviction server if an application thread doesn't find any pages
to evict, and then only once.

Only spin on the LRU lock if there might be pages in the LRU queue to evict.

Keep the current eviction point in memory and make the eviction walk run
concurrent with LRU eviction.

Every test now has err/out captured, and it is checked to assure it is empty at
the end of every test.


WiredTiger release 1.1.1, 2012-03-12
------------------------------------

Default to a verbose build: that can be switched off by running "configure
--enable-silent-rules").

Account for all memory allocated when reading a page into cache.  Total memory
usage is now much closer to the cache size when using many small keys and
values.

Have application threads trigger a retry forced page eviction rather than
blocking eviction.  This allows rec_evict.c to simply set the WT_REF state to
WT_REF_MEM after all failures, and fixes a bug where pages on the forced
eviction queue would end up with state WT_REF_MEM, meaning they could be chosen
for eviction multiple times.

Grow existing scratch buffers in preference to allocating new ones.

Fix a race between threads reading in and then modifying a page.

Get rid of the pinned flag: it is no longer used.

Fix a race where btree files weren't completely closed before they could be
re-opened.  This behavior can be triggered by using a new session on every
operation (see the new -S flag to the test/thread program).  [#178]

When connections are closed, create a session and discard the btree handles.
This fixes a long-standing bug in closing a connection: if for any reason there
are btree handles still open, we need a real session handle to close them.

Really close btree handles: otherwise we can't safely remove or rename them.
Fixes test failures in test_base02 (among others).

Wait for application threads in LRU eviction to drain before walking a file.

Fix a buffer size calculation when updating the root address of a file.

Documentation fix: 10% of 1MB is 100KB.


WiredTiger release 1.1.0, 2012-02-28
------------------------------------

Add checks to the session.truncate method to ensure the start/stop
cursors reference the same object and have been initialized.

Implement cursor duplication via WT_SESSION::open_cursor.  [#161]

Switch to quiet builds by default.

Fix with automake version < 1.11, use foreign mode so that fewer
top-level files are required.

If a session or connection method is about to return WT_NOTFOUND (some
underlying object was not found), map it to ENOENT, only cursor methods
return WT_NOTFOUND. [#163]

Save and restore session->btree in schema ops to simplify calling code.
[#164]

Note the wiredtiger_open config string "multiprocess" is not yet
supported.

Move "root:F" and "version:F" entries for files into the value for
"file:F", so there is only a single record per file.
[NOTE: SCHEMA CHANGE]

When parsing config strings, continue to the end of the string in case
of repeated keys. [#124]

Don't require shared libraries unless Python is configured.

Add support for direct I/O, with the config "direct_io=(data,log)".
Build with _GNU_SOURCE on Linux to enable O_DIRECT.

Don't keep the last page of column stores pinned: it prevented eviction
of large trees created from scratch.

Allow application threads to evict pages from any tree: maintain a count
of threads doing LRU in each tree and wait for activity to drain when
closing.