In the month since 0.5 was branched, we've already made some significant progress, particularly in performance. I can't find a way to easily link the full list in Jira, but these include
408+669 (mmapping sstables for reads instead of using buffered I/O): ~50% speed improvement 658 (better write concurrency): ~1000% improvement when cluster is in degraded state 675 (faster communication between nodes): ~100% improvement of reads and writes 678 (row level caching): up to 120% improvement of reads (workload dependent) We also have some other interesting tickets done: 336: add the ability to insert data to multiple rows at once -- like multiget, but for writes 535: expose StorageProxy to use as a fat client (with StorageService.initClient) 599: give some visibility of what Compaction is busy doing (can be a major source of "why is it slow?") We have a lot of other issues tagged 0.9 (https://issues.apache.org/jira/secure/IssueNavigator.jspa?reset=true&mode=hide&sorter/order=DESC&sorter/field=priority&resolution=-1&pid=12310865&fixfor=12314361), but the above issues and the others done so far are already useful enough to release, both because it helps our existing users of 0.5 [note that none of these introduce compatibility issues of any sort, which makes upgrading especially easy], and because improving performance by that much makes us look better, which helps grow the community. :) On the other hand, creating and stabilizing and testing a new release (that is not bugfix-only) is a non-negligible amount of overhead, and I would give extra weight to Eric Evans's opinion here as release manager. -Jonathan
