Features and Improvements in ArangoDB 2.7

The following list shows in detail which features have been added or improved in ArangoDB 2.7. ArangoDB 2.7 also contains several bugfixes that are not listed here. For a list of bugfixes, please consult the CHANGELOG.

Performance improvements

Index buckets

The primary indexes and hash indexes of collections can now be split into multiple index buckets. This option was available for edge indexes only in ArangoDB 2.6.

A bucket can be considered a container for a specific range of index values. For primary, hash and edge indexes, determining the responsible bucket for an index value is done by hashing the actual index value and applying a simple arithmetic operation on the hash.

Because an index value will be present in at most one bucket and buckets are independent, using multiple buckets provides the following benefits:

  • initially building the in-memory index data can be parallelized even for a single index, with one thread per bucket (or with threads being responsible for more than one bucket at a time). This can help reducing the loading time for collections.

  • resizing an index when it is about to run out of reserve space is performed per bucket. As each bucket only contains a fraction of the entire index, resizing and rehashing a bucket is much faster and less intrusive than resizing and rehashing the entire index.

When creating new collections, the default number of index buckets is 8 since ArangoDB 2.7. In previous versions, the default value was 1. The number of buckets can also be adjusted for existing collections so they can benefit from the optimizations. The number of index buckets can be set for a collection at any time by using a collection’s properties function:

  1.     db.collection.properties({ indexBuckets: 16 });

The number of index buckets must be a power of 2.

Please note that for building the index data for multiple buckets in parallel it is required that a collection contains a significant amount of documents because for a low number of documents the overhead of parallelization will outweigh its benefits. The current threshold value is 256k documents, but this value may change in future versions of ArangoDB. Additionally, the configuration option --database.index-threads will determine how many parallel threads may be used for building the index data.

Faster update and remove operations in non-unique hash indexes

The unique hash indexes in ArangoDB provided an amortized O(1) lookup, insert, update and remove performance. Non-unique hash indexes provided amortized O(1) insert performance, but had worse performance for update and remove operations for non-unique values. For documents with the same index value, they maintained a list of collisions. When a document was updated or removed, that exact document had to be found in the collisions list for the index value. While getting to the start of the collisions list was O(1), scanning the list had O(n) performance in the worst case (with n being the number of documents with the same index value). Overall, this made update and remove operations in non-unique hash indexes slow if the index contained many duplicate values.

This has been changed in ArangoDB 2.7 so that non-unique hash indexes now also provide update and remove operations with an amortized complexity of O(1), even if there are many duplicates.

Resizing non-unique hash indexes now also doesn’t require looking into the document data (which may involve a disk access) because the index maintains some internal cache value per document. When resizing and rehashing the index (or an index bucket), the index will first compare only the cache values before peeking into the actual documents. This change can also lead to reduced index resizing times.

Throughput enhancements

The ArangoDB-internal implementations for dispatching requests, keeping statistics and assigning V8 contexts to threads have been improved in order to use less locks. These changes allow higher concurrency and throughput in these components, which can also make the server handle more requests in a given period of time.

What gains can be expected depends on which operations are executed, but there are real-world cases in which throughput increased by between 25 % and 70 % when compared to 2.6 (see blog post).

Madvise hints

The Linux variant for ArangoDB provides the OS with madvise hints about index memory and datafile memory. These hints can speed up things when memory is tight, in particular at collection load time but also for random accesses later. There is no formal guarantee that the OS actually uses the madvise hints provided by ArangoDB, but actual measurements have shown improvements for loading bigger collections.

AQL improvements

Additional date functions

ArangoDB 2.7 provides several extra AQL functions for date and time calculation and manipulation. These functions were contributed by GitHub users @CoDEmanX and @friday. A big thanks for their work!

The following extra date functions are available from 2.7 on:

  • DATE_DAYOFYEAR(date): Returns the day of year number of date. The return values range from 1 to 365, or 366 in a leap year respectively.

  • DATE_ISOWEEK(date): Returns the ISO week date of date. The return values range from 1 to 53. Monday is considered the first day of the week. There are no fractional weeks, thus the last days in December may belong to the first week of the next year, and the first days in January may be part of the previous year’s last week.

  • DATE_LEAPYEAR(date): Returns whether the year of date is a leap year.

  • DATE_QUARTER(date): Returns the quarter of the given date (1-based):

    • 1: January, February, March
    • 2: April, May, June
    • 3: July, August, September
    • 4: October, November, December

  • DATE_DAYS_IN_MONTH(date): Returns the number of days in date’s month (28..31).

  • DATE_ADD(date, amount, unit): Adds amount given in unit to date and returns the calculated date.

    unit can be either of the following to specify the time unit to add or subtract (case-insensitive):

    • y, year, years
    • m, month, months
    • w, week, weeks
    • d, day, days
    • h, hour, hours
    • i, minute, minutes
    • s, second, seconds
    • f, millisecond, milliseconds

    amount is the number of units to add (positive value) or subtract (negative value).

  • DATE_SUBTRACT(date, amount, unit): Subtracts amount given in unit from date and returns the calculated date.

    It works the same as DATE_ADD(), except that it subtracts. It is equivalent to calling DATE_ADD() with a negative amount, except that DATE_SUBTRACT() can also subtract ISO durations. Note that negative ISO durations are not supported (i.e. starting with -P, like -P1Y).

  • DATE_DIFF(date1, date2, unit, asFloat): Calculate the difference between two dates in given time unit, optionally with decimal places. Returns a negative value if date1 is greater than date2.

  • DATE_COMPARE(date1, date2, unitRangeStart, unitRangeEnd): Compare two partial dates and return true if they match, false otherwise. The parts to compare are defined by a range of time units.

    The full range is: years, months, days, hours, minutes, seconds, milliseconds. Pass the unit to start from as unitRangeStart, and the unit to end with as unitRangeEnd. All units in between will be compared. Leave out unitRangeEnd to only compare unitRangeStart.

  • DATE_FORMAT(date, format): Format a date according to the given format string. It supports the following placeholders (case-insensitive):

    • %t: timestamp, in milliseconds since midnight 1970-01-01
    • %z: ISO date (0000-00-00T00:00:00.000Z)
    • %w: day of week (0..6)
    • %y: year (0..9999)
    • %yy: year (00..99), abbreviated (last two digits)
    • %yyyy: year (0000..9999), padded to length of 4
    • %yyyyyy: year (-009999 .. +009999), with sign prefix and padded to length of 6
    • %m: month (1..12)
    • %mm: month (01..12), padded to length of 2
    • %d: day (1..31)
    • %dd: day (01..31), padded to length of 2
    • %h: hour (0..23)
    • %hh: hour (00..23), padded to length of 2
    • %i: minute (0..59)
    • %ii: minute (00..59), padded to length of 2
    • %s: second (0..59)
    • %ss: second (00..59), padded to length of 2
    • %f: millisecond (0..999)
    • %fff: millisecond (000..999), padded to length of 3
    • %x: day of year (1..366)
    • %xxx: day of year (001..366), padded to length of 3
    • %k: ISO week date (1..53)
    • %kk: ISO week date (01..53), padded to length of 2
    • %l: leap year (0 or 1)
    • %q: quarter (1..4)
    • %a: days in month (28..31)
    • %mmm: abbreviated English name of month (Jan..Dec)
    • %mmmm: English name of month (January..December)
    • %www: abbreviated English name of weekday (Sun..Sat)
    • %wwww: English name of weekday (Sunday..Saturday)
    • %&: special escape sequence for rare occasions
    • %%: literal %
    • %: ignored

RETURN DISTINCT

To return unique values from a query, AQL now provides the DISTINCT keyword. It can be used as a modifier for RETURN statements, as a shorter alternative to the already existing COLLECT statement.

For example, the following query only returns distinct (unique) status attribute values from the collection:

  1.     FOR doc IN collection
  2.       RETURN DISTINCT doc.status

RETURN DISTINCT is not allowed on the top-level of a query if there is no FOR loop in front of it. RETURN DISTINCT is allowed in subqueries.

RETURN DISTINCT ensures that the values returned are distinct (unique), but does not guarantee any order of results. In order to have certain result order, an additional SORT statement must be added to a query.

Shorthand object notation

AQL now provides a shorthand notation for object literals in the style of ES6 object literals:

  1.     LET name = "Peter"
  2.     LET age = 42
  3.     RETURN { name, age }

This is equivalent to the previously available canonical form, which is still available and supported:

  1.     LET name = "Peter"
  2.     LET age = 42
  3.     RETURN { name : name, age : age }

Array expansion improvements

The already existing [*] operator has been improved with optional filtering and projection and limit capabilities.

For example, consider the following example query that filters values from an array attribute:

  1.     FOR u IN users
  2.       RETURN {
  3.         name: u.name,
  4.         friends: (
  5.           FOR f IN u.friends
  6.             FILTER f.age > u.age
  7.             RETURN f.name
  8.         )
  9.       }

With the [*] operator, this query can be simplified to

  1.     FOR u IN users 
  2.       RETURN { name: u.name, friends: u.friends[* FILTER CURRENT.age > u.age].name }

The pseudo-variable CURRENT can be used to access the current array element. The FILTER condition can refer to CURRENT or any variables valid in the outer scope.

To return a projection of the current element, there can now be an inline RETURN:

  1.     FOR u IN users 
  2.       RETURN u.friends[* RETURN CONCAT(CURRENT.name, " is a friend of ", u.name)]

which is the simplified variant for:

  1.     FOR u IN users 
  2.       RETURN (
  3.         FOR friend IN u.friends
  4.           RETURN CONCAT(friend.name, " is a friend of ", u.name)
  5.       )

Array contraction

In order to collapse (or flatten) results in nested arrays, AQL now provides the [**] operator. It works similar to the [*] operator, but additionally collapses nested arrays. How many levels are collapsed is determined by the amount of * characters used.

For example, consider the following query that produces a nested result:

  1.     FOR u IN users 
  2.       RETURN u.friends[*].name

The [**] operator can now be applied to get rid of the nested array and turn it into a flat array. We simply apply the [**] on the previous query result:

  1.     RETURN (
  2.       FOR u IN users RETURN u.friends[*].name
  3.     )[**]

Template query strings

Assembling query strings in JavaScript has been error-prone when using simple string concatenation, especially because plain JavaScript strings do not have multiline-support, and because of potential parameter injection issues. While multiline query strings can be assembled with ES6 template strings since ArangoDB 2.5, and query bind parameters are there since ArangoDB 1.0 to prevent parameter injection, there was no JavaScript-y solution to combine these.

ArangoDB 2.7 now provides an ES6 template string generator function that can be used to easily and safely assemble AQL queries from JavaScript. JavaScript variables and expressions can be used easily using regular ES6 template string substitutions:

  1.     let name = 'test';
  2.     let attributeName = '_key';
  4.     let query = aqlQuery`FOR u IN users 
  5.       FILTER u.name == ${name} 
  6.       RETURN u.${attributeName}`;
  7.     db._query(query);

This is more legible than when using a plain JavaScript string and also does not require defining the bind parameter values separately:

  1.     let name = 'test';
  2.     let attributeName = '_key';
  4.     let query = "FOR u IN users " +
  5.       "FILTER u.name == @name " + 
  6.       "RETURN u.@attributeName";
  7.     db._query(query, { 
  8.       name, 
  9.       attributeName 
  10.     });

The aqlQuery template string generator will also handle collection objects automatically:

  1.     db._query(aqlQuery`FOR u IN ${ db.users } RETURN u.name`);

Note that while template strings are available in the JavaScript functions provided to build queries, they aren’t a feature of AQL itself. AQL could always handle multiline query strings and provided bind parameters (@...) for separating the query string and the parameter values. The aqlQuery template string generator function will take care of this separation, too, but will do it behind the scenes.

AQL query result cache

The AQL query result cache can optionally cache the complete results of all or just selected AQL queries. It can be operated in the following modes:

  • off: the cache is disabled. No query results will be stored
  • on: the cache will store the results of all AQL queries unless their cache attribute flag is set to false
  • demand: the cache will store the results of AQL queries that have their cache attribute set to true, but will ignore all others

The mode can be set at server startup using the --database.query-cache-mode configuration option and later changed at runtime. The default value is off, meaning that the query result cache is disabled. This is because the cache may consume additional memory to keep query results, and also because it must be invalidated when changes happen in collections for which results have been cached.

The query result cache may therefore have positive or negative effects on query execution times, depending on the workload: it will not make much sense turning on the cache in write-only or write-mostly scenarios, but the cache may be very beneficial in case workloads are read-only or read-mostly, and query are complex.

If the query cache is operated in demand mode, it can be controlled per query if the cache should be checked for a result.

Miscellaneous AQL changes

Optimizer

The AQL optimizer rule patch-update-statements has been added. This rule can optimize certain AQL UPDATE queries that update documents in a collection that they also iterate over.

For example, the following query reads documents from a collection in order to update them:

  1.     FOR doc IN collection
  2.       UPDATE doc WITH { newValue: doc.oldValue + 1 } IN collection

In this case, only a single collection is affected by the query, and there is no index lookup involved to find the to-be-updated documents. In this case, the UPDATE query does not require taking a full, memory-intensive snapshot of the collection, but it can be performed in small chunks. This can lead to memory savings when executing such queries.

Function call arguments optimization

This optimization will lead to arguments in function calls inside AQL queries not being copied but being passed by reference. This may speed up calls to functions with bigger argument values or queries that call AQL functions a lot of times.

Web Admin Interface

The web interface now has a new design.

The “Applications” tab in the web interfaces has been renamed to “Services”.

The ArangoDB API documentation has been moved from the “Tools” menu to the “Links” menu. The new documentation is based on Swagger 2.0 and opens in a separate web page.

Foxx improvements

ES2015 Classes

All Foxx constructors have been replaced with ES2015 classes and can be extended using the class syntax. The extend method is still supported at the moment but will become deprecated in ArangoDB 2.8 and removed in ArangoDB 2.9.

Before:

  1. var Foxx = require('org/arangodb/foxx');
  2. var MyModel = Foxx.Model.extend({
  3.   // ...
  4.   schema: {/* ... */}
  5. });

After:

  1. var Foxx = require('org/arangodb/foxx');
  2. class MyModel extends Foxx.Model {
  3.   // ...
  4. }
  5. MyModel.prototype.schema = {/* ... */};

Confidential configuration

It is now possible to specify configuration options with the type password. The password type is equivalent to the text type but will be masked in the web frontend to prevent accidental exposure of confidential options like API keys and passwords when configuring your Foxx application.

Dependencies

The syntax for specifying dependencies in manifests has been extended to allow specifying optional dependencies. Unmet optional dependencies will not prevent an app from being mounted. The traditional shorthand syntax for specifying non-optional dependencies will still be supported in the upcoming versions of ArangoDB.

Before:

  1. {
  2.   ...
  3.   "dependencies": {
  4.     "notReallyNeeded": "users:^1.0.0",
  5.     "totallyNecessary": "sessions:^1.0.0"
  6.   }
  7. }

After:

  1. {
  2.   "dependencies": {
  3.     "notReallyNeeded": {
  4.       "name": "users",
  5.       "version": "^1.0.0",
  6.       "required": false
  7.     },
  8.     "totallyNecessary": {
  9.       "name": "sessions",
  10.       "version": "^1.0.0"
  11.     }
  12.   }
  13. }

Replication

The existing replication HTTP API has been extended with methods that replication clients can use to determine whether a given date, identified by a tick value, is still present on a master for replication. By calling these APIs, clients can make an informed decision about whether the master can still provide all missing data starting from the point up to which the client had already synchronized. This can be helpful in case a replication client is re-started after a pause.

Master servers now also track up the point up to which they have sent changes to clients for replication. This information can be used to determine the point of data that replication clients have received from the master, and if and how far approximately they lag behind.

Finally, restarting the replication applier on a slave server has been made more robust in case the applier was stopped while there were pending transactions on the master server, and re-starting the replication applier needs to restore the state of these transactions.

Client tools

The filenames in dumps created by arangodump now contain not only the name of the dumped collection, but also an additional 32-digit hash value. This is done to prevent overwriting dump files in case-insensitive file systems when there exist multiple collections with the same name (but with different cases).

For example, if a database had two collections test and Test, previous versions of arangodump created the following files:

  • test.structure.json and test.data.json for collection test
  • Test.structure.json and Test.data.json for collection Test

This did not work in case-insensitive filesystems, because the files for the second collection would have overwritten the files of the first. arangodump in 2.7 will create the unique files in this case, by appending the 32-digit hash value to the collection name in all case. These filenames will be unambiguous even in case-insensitive filesystems.

Miscellaneous changes

Better control-C support in arangosh

When CTRL-C is pressed in arangosh, it will now abort the locally running command (if any). If no command was running, pressing CTRL-C will print a ^C first. Pressing CTRL-C again will then quit arangosh.

CTRL-C can also be used to reset the current prompt while entering complex nested objects which span multiple input lines.

CTRL-C support has been added to the ArangoShell versions built with Readline-support (Linux and macOS only). The Windows version of ArangoDB uses a different library for handling input, and support for CTRL-C has not been added there yet.

Start / stop

Linux startup scripts and systemd configuration for arangod now try to adjust the NOFILE (number of open files) limits for the process. The limit value is set to 131072 (128k) when ArangoDB is started via start/stop commands.

This will prevent arangod running out of available file descriptors in case of many parallel HTTP connections or large collections with many datafiles.

Additionally, when ArangoDB is started/stopped manually via the start/stop commands, the main process will wait for up to 10 seconds after it forks the supervisor and arangod child processes. If the startup fails within that period, the start/stop script will fail with a non-zero exit code, allowing any invoking scripts to handle this error. Previous versions always returned an exit code of 0, even when arangod couldn’t be started.

If the startup of the supervisor or arangod is still ongoing after 10 seconds, the main program will still return with exit code 0 in order to not block any scripts. The limit of 10 seconds is arbitrary because the time required for an arangod startup is not known in advance.

Non-sparse logfiles

WAL logfiles and datafiles created by arangod are now non-sparse. This prevents SIGBUS signals being raised when a memory-mapped region backed by a sparse datafile was accessed and the memory region was not actually backed by disk, for example because the disk ran out of space.

arangod now always fully allocates the disk space required for a logfile or datafile when it creates one, so the memory region can always be backed by disk, and memory can be accessed without SIGBUS being raised.