The next version of Quasar, 3.14.2, scheduled for this summer, will be packed with new features, enhancements, and bug fixes.
We recommend that all users upgrade to 3.14.2 as soon as it is released, as it brings significant performance improvements and several new major features.
Quasar 3.14.2 is backward-compatible with previous versions.
Performance
From ingress to egress to queries, everything will feel faster. Sometimes, the gain will be a modest 20%, but complex aggregations can see a 10x improvement.
Latency is better across the board, and the tail is much shorter.
This is all thanks to structural work on the internal data structure, optimized compression algorithms, and careful review of bottlenecks across all engines.
Additionally, we’re happy to introduce a new high-performance bulk reader API in Quasar 3.14.2 for users who need to egress data quickly out of Quasar.
Better memory management
Quasar uses less memory and knows better what to keep in the cache. Our brand-new caching strategy is a derivative of LRU-2 and is scan-resistant.
How does this translate on a daily basis? If you were to run a query that touches a lot of data but runs only once, the data is unlikely to be kept in memory, meaning wide scans occurring rarely don’t pollute the cache anymore.
Quasar cache is also less “laggy,” meaning it will react faster to usage spikes and ensure it stays within the configured limits.
More powerful analytics, more convenience
We’ve added long-awaited quantile functions, both probabilistic and exact, to give you a choice between accuracy and performance.
We’ve also enhanced control over time zones, giving you more time manipulation capabilities for complex queries.
Aggregated tables can now optionally persist their internal state for use cases that need strong resiliency.
You will also notice several user experience improvements, such as support for multiline queries in the shell, more flexible windowing operations, and more operations composability.
The ODBC driver has received special attention and supports more applications out of the box, and SAS Viya support has been greatly improved.
In the convenience department, this version will start the phasing out of the external import tool in favor of the new IMPORT query.
Enhanced monitoring capabilities
This release features a new JSON logger that makes it easy to find important information when plugged into modern monitoring solutions.
We’ve reworked all internal metrics with a more homogeneous naming scheme. This change might require you to rework your monitoring scripts.
Thanks to the new user properties, you can attach custom key values to every operation, helping you identify faster and more accurately which application may be causing undesired behavior.
Lastly, we’ve made it easier and faster to identify troublesome queries even without using user properties, with enriched contextual logging.
How did we do?
We’ve been hard at work doing some fundamental work on Quasar 3.14.2, which is our best Quasar yet. We would love to hear from you as we strive to make Quasar the best platform for numerical AI.