RavenDB 3.5 Release Candidate

time to read 2 min | 365 words

I’m very happy to announce that the Release Candidate of RavenDB is now available. We have been working hard for the past few months to incorporate feedback that we got from customers who started using the beta, and we are finally ready.

There have been quite a lot of fixes, improvements and enhancements, but in this post I want to focus on the most exciting three.

Waiting for write assurance

Take a look at the following code:

It asks RavenDB to save a new user, and then wait (on the server) for the newly saved changes to be replicated to at least another 2 servers, up to a maximum of 30 seconds.

This give you the option of choosing how safe you want to be on saves. For high value documents (a million dollar order, for example), we will accept the additional delay.

Waiting for indexes

In the same vein, we have this:

This feature is meant specific for PRG (Post, Redirect, Get) scenarios, where you add a new document and immediately query for it. In this case, you can ask the server to wait until the indexes are caught up with this particular write.

You can also set a timeout and whatever to throw or not. But more interestingly, you can specify specific indexes that you want to wait for. If you don’t specify anything, RavenDB will automatically select just the indexes that are impacted by this write.

Dynamic leader selection

In the RavenDB Conference, we showed how you can define a cluster of RavenDB servers and have them vote on a leader dynamically, then route all writes to the leader. In the presence of failure, we will select a new leader and stick to it as long as it is able.

Some of the feedback we got was related to how we select the leader. We now take into account the state of the databases on the server, and will not select a leader whose databases aren’t up to date with regards to replication. We also reduced the cost of replication in general, by significantly reducing the amount of metadata that we need to track.