SQL Relay 1.0.0 Release Announcement

Version 1.0.0 of SQL Relay, the powerful connection pool, load balancer, query router, and database proxy, is now available.

At great length: 1.0.0!

The client APIs has been stable for a long time. The server APIs have been stable for long enough. Recent efforts during the past few releases updated the internal structure such that significant internal changes can be made without affecting the API or ABI. Yes, it's definitely time for a 1.0.0 release.

Of course, no project is ever feature-complete. There are still plenty of tasks in the backlog, but it should be possible to implement most, or all, of them without breaking the API and ABI.

New Features

The most noticeable new feature in this release is that all DB abstraction layer drivers support the same set of connect-string options, including TLS and Kerberos options, as well as columnnamecase, resultsetbuffersize, dontgetcolumninfo, nullsasnulls, and lazyconnect options. The options are named subtly differetly for each driver, following the conventions for the DB abstraction layer, but all options are present.

Changes

This release mainly features a bunch of internal changes though. Most improve performance or stability in one way or another.

The most outwardly noticeable change is that column names are case-sensitive now when getting a field by name. The docs never promised case insensitivity, and the performance improvement is notable. Also, there are options for upper and lower-casing column names, if you need them to be converted one way or the other.

Another semi-noticeable changes is the removal of calls to mysql_stmt_store_result/mysql_stmt_num_rows in the mysql database connection module. Actually the removal of them isn't the noticeable part. Rather, that since they have been removed, the row count is no longer available immediately, if a result-set-buffer-size is being used. This is consistent with almost all other databases though, and by default, no result-set-buffer-size is used.

Another, nearly unnoticeable change, is that by default now, connections start with 1 cursor, but will scale up, on-demand, to 5 cursors. Of course, maxcursors can be set higher or lower than 5, but it defaults to 5.

Most other changes were fixes for subtle bugs or tweaks to improve performance.

Full ChangeLog follows:

• updated md5 pwdenc to use rudiments md5 class
• solved a long-standing hang that could occur if the database password expired while sqlrelay was running, and the sqlr-scaler attempted to start new connections
• added convertcase, convertcasedoublequotes, and removedoublequotes parameters to normalize translation module
• added ColumnCaseName parameter to ODBC driver
• fixed a subtle bug in the ODBC driver that caused the first row to be skipped if columns were not bound
• added -backtrace option for debugging
• fixed mysql connection module so it can use the statement API on Windows
• fixed semaphore reference-before-init bug in sqlrservercontroller
• added support for db, debug, columnnamecase, dontgetcolumninfo, nullsasnulls, and lazyconnect connect-string options to all drivers (though in some they are camel-case and others lower-case)
• in DB-abstraction-layer drivers, the debug, dontgetcolumninfo, nullsasnulls, lazyconnect, krb, and tls connect-string options now support any yes/no equivalent such as yes, Yes, y, Y, true, True, 1, (and similar for no)
• fixed a regression that could cause crashes in the C#/ADO driver when binding null or date values
• added all parameters to ODBC config screen
• removed calls to mysql_stmt_store_result/mysql_stmt_num_rows from mysql connection to improve performance. mysql connection doesn't know the total number of rows prior to full fetch now (which is consistent with most other databases).
• updated postgresql connection to use an unnamed cursor instead of naming it and having to deallocate it over an over
• tweaked skipWhitespaceAndComments and related methods to use charstring::isNullOrEmpty and character::isWhitespace
• replaced regular expression comparisons in sap/freetds connections with simpler charstring comparisons
• updated db2 connection to reuse the statement instead of recreating it with each prepare
• made column-lookup by name case sensitive to improve performance
• fixed nagle-disable and sizing of socket read/write buffers
• changed default maxcursors to 5
• fixed an uninitialized variable in the firebird connection
• python api's are installed in dist-packages subdirectory on systems that have that instead of site-packages
• added route-entire-session option to router modules