January 2019 DB-Engines Newsletter: Latest Database Releases & Key Features

DB-Engines Ranking Overview

The ranking is based on five factors: keyword search volume on Google and Bing, Google Trends, job postings on Indeed, LinkedIn profile mentions, and StackOverflow activity. The latest ranking image is shown below.

News Highlights

Microsoft previewed SQL Server 2019, integrating Spark for a unified data platform.

ElasticSearch listed on the NYSE.

Amazon abandoned Oracle DB software, causing a brief outage and a 2% pre‑market stock dip.

Percona released Server 8.0 RC with MongoDB 4.0 support.

Gartner published its 2018 database reports.

Neo4j completed an $80 M Series E round and closed its enterprise edition source.

Alibaba acquired DataArtisans (Apache Flink commercial company) for $103.3 M.

Amazon announced a new cloud database competing directly with MongoDB.

RDBMS Family Updates

Oracle 18.3

Oracle Database 18.3 (a universal patch for 12c R2) is now downloadable, with yearly feature releases and an upcoming 19c cloud version. Key enhancements include:

5× faster RAC OLTP performance.

2× faster in‑memory row store lookups.

Advanced In‑Memory features for joins, expressions, and JSON.

Memoptimized Rowstore for low‑latency IoT lookups.

Improved COUNT/DISTINCT/GROUP queries.

Automatic indexing.

MySQL 8.0.13

Released on 22 Oct 2018, the update focuses on security, schema enforcement, and optimizer improvements.

Account management: Password changes now require the current password (parameter password_require_current).

Configuration: sql_require_primary_key forces a primary key on InnoDB tables.

Default values: BLOB, TEXT, GEOMETRY, and JSON columns can now have defaults.

Optimizer: Skip Scan for non‑prefix indexes and function‑based indexes.

SQL syntax: GROUP BY ASC/DESC deprecated; use GROUP BY ORDER BY ASC/DESC.

Other changes: New innodb_fsync_threshold, session‑level temporary tablespaces, and online Group Replication state switching.

Example for Skip Scan:

CREATE TABLE t1 (f1 INT NOT NULL, f2 INT NOT NULL, PRIMARY KEY(f1, f2));

EXPLAIN SELECT f1, f2 FROM t1 WHERE f2 > 40;

MariaDB 10.3

Highlights include multi‑table UPDATE with ORDER BY LIMIT, online DDL safety patches, and window functions.

Multi‑table UPDATE example (fails on MySQL 8.0):

update t1 join t2 on t1.id=t2.id set t1.name='hechunyang' limit 3;

Function‑based index example:

CREATE INDEX idx1 ON t1 ((col1 + col2));

CREATE INDEX idx2 ON t1 ((col1 + col2), (col1 - col2), col1);

ALTER TABLE t1 ADD INDEX ((col1 * 40) DESC);

Percona Server 8.0 GA

Released 21 Dec 2018, adds security plugins (audit log, PAM authentication, encryption), performance boosts (Threadpool, enhanced InnoDB, MyRocks), and observability improvements. Deprecated features include the TokuDB engine and query cache.

RocksDB 5.17.2

Released 24 Oct 2018, adds a customizable CacheAllocator, allow_write_stall flush control, recovery‑time transaction handling, and fixes for snapshot‑induced slowdowns and key‑lookup bugs.

PostgreSQL 11

Released 18 Oct 2018, major enhancements:

JIT compilation for faster query execution.

Parallel query improvements (10× faster hash joins, parallel CREATE INDEX/TABLE AS).

Improved hash joins and sequential scans.

Stored procedures now support autonomous transactions.

Columns can have defaults without table rewrite.

Hash partitioning added for partitioned tables.

New plugins include Citus 8.1 (sharding), PostGIS 2.5.1 (spatial), TimescaleDB 1.1.1 (time‑series), and PipelineDB (stream processing).

DB2 11.1.4.4

Introduces AVX‑512‑optimized performance, enhanced HADR, async mirror log writes, new monitoring options ( db2pd -barstats), and extensive JSON SQL functions complying with ISO/IEC 19075‑6.

NoSQL Family Updates

Redis 5.0.3

Released 12 Dec 2018 with numerous bug fixes and improvements, such as better MONITOR/SYNC handling, ordered‑set edge‑case fixes, enhanced Unix support, IPv6 networking fixes, cluster‑mode CLI enhancements, more precise memory accounting, a new DEBUG DIGEST‑VALUE command, and stricter command execution during role switches.

MongoDB Mobile & Stitch

MongoDB announced Mobile (on‑device) and Stitch (backend‑as‑a‑service) updates, enabling real‑time sync between mobile and cloud, offline reads/writes, JSON storage, and server‑side functions for IoT and app development.

Cassandra 3.11.3

Released 11 Aug 2018, includes bug fixes for pre‑creation delete logs, SSTable compression, outbound TCP connection counting, gossip blocking, JVM OOM handling, and more.

NewSQL Family Updates

TiDB 2.1.2

Released 22 Dec 2018, TiDB (HTAP) adds compatibility improvements, stability fixes, and new features such as Kafka‑compatible binlog, rolling‑upgrade exit handling, UTF‑8 character checks, and various optimizer and index bug fixes.

EsgynDB R2.5

Released 22 Dec 2018, adds hot/cold data support, Hive DDL, SSL, fine‑grained permissions, HA improvements, heterogeneous machine support, performance boosts for scans and updates, and easier installation via Ambari.

CockroachDB 2.1

Released 30 Oct 2018, introduces enterprise features (CDC to Kafka, transparent encryption, parallel export), new SQL capabilities (column type changes, CANCEL JOB/QUERIES, cost‑based optimizer, EXPLAIN (DIST)SQL, sub‑query support), kernel enhancements (leaseholder control, DBeaver UI, load‑based rebalancing, MySQL migration), and admin UI upgrades (hardware dashboard, statements page, user authentication).

Time Series

TimescaleDB 1.0

Released early 2019, the first production‑ready version of the PostgreSQL‑based time‑series extension, offering automatic time‑space chunking, improved availability, background job automation, and native Grafana/Prometheus monitoring. Download at https://github.com/timescale/timescaledb/releases/tag/1.0.0.

Big Data Ecosystem

Hadoop 2.9.2

Released mid‑Nov 2018, adds Alibaba OSS support, a new resource estimator, routing‑based federation, YARN federation and opportunistic containers, and API‑based queue configuration.

Greenplum 5.15

Introduces a streaming data load tool with Kafka integration, supporting JSON, Avro, binary formats, custom parsers, and mini‑batch high‑throughput transfers.

Domestic Database Overview

K‑DB Integrated Appliance

Released 7 Nov 2018, features a three‑tier architecture (DB Server, InfiniBand network, Storage Server), function offloading, flash caching, storage indexing, and 56 Gbps RDMA support.

OceanBase Migration Service 1.0

Released 4 Jan 2019, supports Oracle, MySQL, and OceanBase sources, offering full and incremental migration, minute‑level rollback, one‑click migration, load‑playback verification, and second‑level data consistency checks.

SequoiaDB 3.0.1

Provides a compute‑storage separated architecture compatible with MySQL, supports heterogeneous hardware, adds snapshot parameters, LOB EOF interface, global unique IDs for collections, and enhanced deployment packages.

Cloud Databases

Tencent CynosDB (public beta)

Announced 22 Nov 2018, a MySQL‑compatible, PostgreSQL‑compatible distributed cloud database offering up to 1.3 M QPS reads, 8× MySQL performance, 180× backup speed, HA, and a price roughly 1/15 of commercial alternatives.

JD Cloud DRDS 1.0

Released 24 Dec 2018, a distributed relational middleware providing automatic sharding, high availability, MySQL compatibility, and scaling to tens of thousands of QPS.

RadonDB 1.0.3

Released 26 Dec 2018, adds global tables for faster joins, streaming parallel fetch, and ClickHouse MPP integration.

Newsletter Initiative

The dbaplus Newsletter aims to deliver the latest database industry trends without commercial bias, covering RDBMS, NoSQL, NewSQL, time‑series, big data, domestic, and cloud databases. New issues are planned roughly every three months; the next issue is scheduled for 14‑25 Apr 2019.

Thank You List

Credits are given to experts who contributed information and suggestions. Contributions and article submissions are welcomed via [email protected] or [email protected]. The project’s source code is hosted at https://github.com/dbaplus/DBAplus_Newsletter.

Download the full January 2019 newsletter here: https://pan.baidu.com/s/13BgipbaHeMfvm0YPtiYviA