Windows Support
The most significant feature of this release is preliminary support for the SQL Relay server on Windows. The client API's and command line programs have long supported Windows, but in this release, it's possible to run the SQL Relay server on Windows as well.
This is a preliminary release,it currently only supports Oracle, and there are some quirks, but it's a good first step.
Running the SQL Relay server on Windows is much the same as on Linux or Unix, just run sqlr-start as described in the documentation. The biggest quirk is that it doesn't run as a service yet. You must currently run it from a console window and if you close the console window, it kills the processes. Other quirks: sqlr-status doesn't work yet and the various loadable modules such as password encryption, authentication and logging don't work yet. Also, only Oracle databases are currently supported. You can't run SQL Relay on Windows, against Sybase, DB2, MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite, MS Access or MS SQL Server yet.
Building SQL Relay on Windows is tricky and currently requires the right versions of things to be in the right places (as described in the documentation) so if you want to try SQL Relay on Windows, I recommend the SQL Relay Binary Distribution for Windows, available on the downloads page for a small fee.
Also, if you are running a 64-bit OS then use the 64-bit version of SQL Relay. The 32-bit version doesn't perform well on 64-bit systems. The issues it has appear to affect other applications as well though, and don't appear to be specific to SQL Relay.
Configuration and Init Improvements
Another significant new feature is support for an sqlrelay.conf.d directory. As of this release, in addition to the sqlrelay.conf file, all configuration files in the sqlrelay.conf.d directory are also processed. This makes it possible to keep instance configurations separate.
The init script and sqlr-start program have also been updated. Rather than running sqlr-start with each instance listed in /etc/sqlrelay or /etc/sysconfig/sqlrelay, the init script now just runs sqlr-start without specifying an instance. If run without specifying an instance, sqlr-start now digs through the configuration files and starts all instances with enabled="yes" attributes.
Together, these updates make configuration much cleaner, but in particular make it much easier for third party applications to install a configuration and cause an instance to start at boot.
Threaded Listener
The sqlr-listener can run in either multi-process or multi-thread mode and now runs in multi-thread mode by default, which is much faster and lighter weight.
PHP Improvements
PHP ini files are now installed to enable the PHP and PHP PDO modules. It's no longer necessary (on modern platforms, at least) to manually enable them.
PHP PDO Improvements
The PHP PDO driver features many improvements.
The connect-string now includes resultsetbuffersize, dontgetcolumninfo and nullsasnulls parameters. The debug connect-string parameter can be set to a file name to send debug information to a file instead of to the browser.
Output bind variables can be bound to streams now. It is, for example, possible to fetch a blob directly into a file, using an output bind variable.
Samat Yusupov contributed a set of driver-methods for ending, suspending and resuming sessions. They have been incorporated and improved a little, as described in the documentation.
Perl DBI Improvements
The Perl DBI driver is much improved as well.
Support for the maxrows parameter to fetchall_arrayref has been added. The begin_work method works now. The get_info method works properly now.
RowCacheSize and RowsInCache attributes work correctly now. The entire result set is now buffered by default (as is the case with other SQL Relay client API's) unless the RowCacheSize is set.
A custom ext_SQLR_Debug database handle attribute now allows debug to be turned on or off or sent to a file.
Type, length, precision and scale attributes can now be set for bind variables. Output bind BLOBs and CLOBs work now.
The ParamValues, ParamTypes and ParamArrays attributes work correctly now.
The driver works correctly with very old versions of Perl DBI now too.
Lots of fixes.
SAP ASE Support
SAP/Sybase ASE 16.0 is supported now. The configure script detects it properly. Version 16.0 revealed a few bugs that have been fixed too.
PostgreSQL Improvements
It is now possible to connect to PostgreSQL databases over SSL using the sslmode option.
JMeter Support
The ODBC driver has been improved sufficiently to work with JMeter via the JDBC-ODBC bridge. JMeter can now be used to benchmark all tiers of the application directly. This is helpful in determining whether a performance problem lies in the database, SQL Relay, or the app.
Changes Under the Hood
Internally, quite a few things were restructured. A lot of tightly coupled code has been decoupled and refactored into frameworks with plugins. This ought to be invisible to the end user, but should enable much more modular development in the future.
Bug Fixes
A slew of bugs have been fixed.
Some are significant:
- Oracle JDK 7 and 8 are now detected correctly on Debian/Ubuntu systems.
- Blobs work when faking input binds now.
- Everything ought to compile cleanly with clang now.
- DB2 output bind BLOBs aren't truncated any more.
- sqlrsh doesn't lose the timezone when binding dates any more.
- The PostgreSQL drop-in replacement library had buggy implementations of PQreset, PQresetStart, PQresetPoll. Those are fixed.
- The MySQL drop-in replacement library had implementations of mysql_row_seek, mysql_row_tell., mysql_stmt_row_seek and mysql_stmt_row_tell that didn't work on platforms with 32-bit void pointers. Those are fixed.
- Subtle bugs related to keeping track of the total row count in the sybase and freetds connections have been fixed.
- Old versions of Perl (5.00x) are supported now.
- An obscure bug that caused DB2 output bind integers to be copied out incorrectly sometimes has been fixed.
- A very obscure bug that could cause Oracle connections to crash sometime later if an output bind cursor was used to fetch blob data has been fixed.
