Sorry for the week delay; gave us some more time to grind away on 4.1! [Housekeeping] Congrats Jacek Lewandowski on being voted in as a committer on the project!
After years of service in the role of PMC Chair, Nate McCall has stepped down from the role. This role most often does its work behind the scenes, liaising between the PMC and the Apache Foundation, and I think it's important to shed light on that once in awhile and let you know how much we all appreciate your hard work in the role Nate. So: thanks! The PMC voted and chose Mick Semb Wever as the new PMC Chair - for any of you who haven't had the pleasure of working with him yet, he's a delight. :) Looking forward to working with you further mck. For context on the role, from Paulo's announcement email about this to the dev list: The chair is an administrative position that interfaces with the Apache Software Foundation Board, by submitting regular reports about project status and health. Read more about the PMC chair role on Apache projects: - https://www.apache.org/foundation/how-it-works.html#pmc - https://www.apache.org/foundation/how-it-works.html#pmc-chair - https://www.apache.org/foundation/faq.html#why-are-PMC-chairs-officers Of note, many projects change the pmc chair on a regular cadence (yearly, etc) so more members on the project can get exposure to the foundation and the quarterly reporting on community and project health. Ok, so how's 4.1 looking? First, active test failures: https://butler.cassandra.apache.org/#/ We're down to ~5 on 4.1. If we take a look at the top level kanban we have 15 tickets blocking 4.1 beta and 2 blocking RC https://issues.apache.org/jira/secure/RapidBoard.jspa?rapidView=484&quickFilter=2455 Of those, we only have 5 issues blocking the beta that are unassigned: https://issues.apache.org/jira/secure/RapidBoard.jspa?rapidView=484&quickFilter=2455&quickFilter=2160 Thanks everyone for the continued hard work; we'll take a look at the other branches in a bit when we cover CI. [New Contributors Getting Started] You know those 5 issues blocking the beta that are unassigned? :) Look for test failures and run with them! To give a bit more guidance, here's an explanation of various types of contribution: https://cassandra.apache.org/_/community.html#how-to-contribute An overview of the C* architecture: https://cassandra.apache.org/doc/latest/cassandra/architecture/overview.html And here's our getting started contributing guide: https://cassandra.apache.org/_/development/index.html We hang out in #cassandra-dev on https://the-asf.slack.com, and you can ping the @cassandra_mentors alias to reach 13 of us who have volunteered to mentor new contributors on the project. Come hang out! [Dev list Digest] https://lists.apache.org/list?dev@cassandra.apache.org:lte=3w: Covering 3 weeks on the dev list this round instead of our regular 2. The status update from 6-14 discussion around what qualifies as breaking changes drew to a close; the conclusion appears to be that our APIs are pretty easy to infer and that the shortcoming historically has been the lack of documentation around those heuristics: "If it’s a part of our UX it’s probably something we should maintain backwards compatibility for. If it’s part of our internal codebase, probably not. The only two “public” APIs we have inside the codebase that I’m aware of are triggers and secondary indexes, and these are provided with limited warranty and an expectation of technical sophistication for their users." Since an API breaking change pushes us from a .x to an X.0 release (i.e. Major vs. Minor), we bring discussions to the dev ML about changing APIs and necessitating a new major release. We converged on a syntax for multi-key transactions: https://lists.apache.org/thread/zf1zr2mg1wxb0j5ydc23jncbgojfp6qz. Abe had one outstanding question that I didn't see addressed on the thread but we can cover on the JIRA when it opens (if that JIRA is already open and I missed that, sorry about that; ping the thread here Blake ;)) We continue to have a steady stream of marketing and blogs for review hit the dev list. This format's working well for me as a reviewer; is that the case for everyone else? Would anyone like to see something different (a specific list for blog reviews, etc)? Henrik reached out a couple of weeks ago about a potential revamping of our community site with something open to github authenticated folks adding entries: "The point with the site is that anyone is welcome to authenticate with your github account, and submit an entry with links to your favorite Cassandra addon or tool. The idea is that for example the developer of a tool is welcome to add and maintain their own entry." This email came in on July 4th which I know I personally missed and will need to catch up on; possible some others missed it due to US holidays as well. Email thread is here: https://lists.apache.org/thread/0839pvq8ob18782fpjy2coro17v7lyvg Ekaterina continues to fight the good fight when it comes to our properties, their units, and config params. From her email earlier today: "converting between megabits and mebibytes produces double numbers which we already handle internally. Now, the question is how do we want to handle this in JMX/nodetool when reporting to the users?": https://lists.apache.org/thread/vgnjnkhbml7zocxpohth8x443rzgvbz5 And last but not least, Apache Cassandra version 4.0.5 was released earlier today. https://lists.apache.org/thread/c8n7hl8759j6cnm3qggq0yb89vqnc0gs. The list of changes can be found here in CHANGES.txt: https://gitbox.apache.org/repos/asf?p=cassandra.git;a=blob_plain;f=CHANGES.txt;hb=refs/tags/cassandra-4.0.5. Of specific note is the work in CASSANDRA-15511: * Utilise BTree improvements to reduce garbage and improve throughput, a collaboration between Benedict and Benjamin we can expect to see make a huge impact on access to contended collections in the 4.0 line as well as significant reduction in allocations across the board for all operations. [CI Trends] https://butler.cassandra.apache.org/#/ The last three weeks show us this delightful trend: 3.0: 10 -> 10 3.11: 23 -> 15 4.0: 2 -> 1 4.1: 8 -> 10 -> 5 trunk: 20 -> 5 That's 36 total failures across all our branches! This is a new low watermark for us; we're getting close to both a 4.1 RC as well as needing to start serious discussions about potential improvements to our workflows to keep these test boards green. Knocking down flaky test failures continues to be a high-investment activity for the project; thank you as always to everyone taking the time to drive CI back to health! [Release progress] https://issues.apache.org/jira/secure/RapidBoard.jspa?rapidView=484&quickFilter=2175 4.1 alpha: - A flaky test fix, and the big delta mentioned above in CASSANDRA-15511 improving our BTrees in certain data models. Note: this also landed in the 4.0.5 release as mentioned above. 4.1 beta: - 15 issues closed out in the past 3 weeks. A big one I know I personally have high hopes for is CASSANDRA-17729 where Berenguer raised the test timeouts for the ASF infra environment. 10 test fixes, a change to compactionstats output to keep it from breaking the API in CASSANDRA-17683 (the motivation for the status email discussion on what constitutes our API's mentioned above), and some unit and accessor work in CASSANDRA-17733 and 17650. 4.1 rc: - Documentation (17275), CQL version (17570), removal of commons-lang dependency during build (17724), and fixing the toString on AbstractCell (17695). 4.0.x: - Caleb's been a busy bee in the in-JVM dtest space with 17731 as well as worked on some general test failures that land in this lane on the kanban (17139, 17706) 4.x: - One I don't want to fly under the radar: "Virtual table to expose current running queries" in https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/CASSANDRA-15241. Chris Lohfink, Benedict, and Caleb collaborated to bring this feature forward; having extensively used functionality like this in the past on another database as an SRE, I expect this will be a big help to individuals running C* that are looking for new insight into what's going on in their clusters and troubleshooting production issues. Great work everyone! Sorry again for the delay on this digest; I plan on shooting for a 2 week cadence synced up with today going forward. Thanks as always everyone for everything you do as a part of this community! ~Josh
