* We have refactored our system of stalling writes. Any stall-related statistics' meanings are changed. Instead of per-write stall counts, we now count stalls per-epoch, where epochs are periods between flushes and compactions. You'll find more information in our Tuning Perf Guide once we release RocksDB 3.6.
* Move BlockBasedTable related options to BlockBasedTableOptions from Options. Change corresponding JNI interface. Options affected include:
no_block_cache, block_cache, block_cache_compressed, block_size, block_size_deviation, block_restart_interval, filter_policy, whole_key_filtering. filter_policy is changed to shared_ptr from a raw pointer.
* Remove deprecated options: disable_seek_compaction and db_stats_log_interval
* OptimizeForPointLookup() takes one parameter for block cache size. It now builds hash index, bloom filter, and block cache.
* Added iterate_upper_bound to define the extent upto which the forward iterator will return entries. This will prevent iterating over delete markers and overwritten entries for edge cases where you want to break out the iterator anyways. This may improve perfomance in case there are a large number of delete markers or overwritten entries.
* HashLinklist reduces performance outlier caused by skewed bucket by switching data in the bucket from linked list to skip list. Add parameter threshold_use_skiplist in NewHashLinkListRepFactory().
* RocksDB is now able to reclaim storage space more effectively during the compaction process. This is done by compensating the size of each deletion entry by the 2X average value size, which makes compaction to be triggerred by deletion entries more easily.
* Add TimeOut API to write. Now WriteOptions have a variable called timeout_hint_us. With timeout_hint_us set to non-zero, any write associated with this timeout_hint_us may be aborted when it runs longer than the specified timeout_hint_us, and it is guaranteed that any write completes earlier than the specified time-out will not be aborted due to the time-out condition.
* Add a rate_limiter option, which controls total throughput of flush and compaction. The throughput is specified in bytes/sec. Flush always has precedence over compaction when available bandwidth is constrained.
* We removed seek compaction as a concept from RocksDB because:
1) It makes more sense for spinning disk workloads, while RocksDB is primarily designed for flash and memory,
2) It added some complexity to the important code-paths,
3) None of our internal customers were really using it.
Because of that, Options::disable_seek_compaction is now obsolete. It is still a parameter in Options, so it does not break the build, but it does not have any effect. We plan to completely remove it at some point, so we ask users to please remove this option from your code base.
* Added new option BlockBasedTableOptions::hash_index_allow_collision. When enabled, prefix hash index for block-based table will not store prefix and allow hash collision, reducing memory consumption.
* PlainTable now supports a new key encoding: for keys of the same prefix, the prefix is only written once. It can be enabled through encoding_type paramter of NewPlainTableFactory()
* Add AdaptiveTableFactory, which is used to convert from a DB of PlainTable to BlockBasedTabe, or vise versa. It can be created using NewAdaptiveTableFactory()
* Hash index for block-based table will be materialized and reconstructed more efficiently. Previously hash index is constructed by scanning the whole table during every table open.
* Deprecated ReadOptions.prefix and ReadOptions.prefix_seek. Seek() defaults to prefix-based seek when Options.prefix_extractor is supplied. More detail is documented in https://github.com/facebook/rocksdb/wiki/Prefix-Seek-API-Changes
* Change default value of several options, including: paranoid_checks=true, max_open_files=5000, level0_slowdown_writes_trigger=20, level0_stop_writes_trigger=24, disable_seek_compaction=true, max_background_flushes=1 and allow_mmap_writes=false
* A new SST format "PlainTable" is added, which is optimized for memory-only workloads. It can be created through NewPlainTableFactory() or NewTotalOrderPlainTableFactory().
* A new mem table implementation hash linked list optimizing for the case that there are only few keys for each prefix, which can be created through NewHashLinkListRepFactory().
* Merge operator supports a new function PartialMergeMulti() to allow users to do partial merges against multiple operands.
* Now compaction filter has a V2 interface. It buffers the kv-pairs sharing the same key prefix, process them in batches, and return the batched results back to DB. The new interface uses a new structure CompactionFilterContext for the same purpose as CompactionFilter::Context in V1.
* Implemented [TailingIterator](https://github.com/facebook/rocksdb/wiki/Tailing-Iterator), a special type of iterator that
doesn't create a snapshot (can be used to read newly inserted data)
and is optimized for doing sequential reads.
* Added property block for table, which allows (1) a table to store
its metadata and (2) end user to collect and store properties they
are interested in.
* Enabled caching index and filter block in block cache (turned off by default).
* Supported error report when doing manual compaction.
* Supported additional Linux platform flavors and Mac OS.
* Put with `SliceParts` - Variant of `Put()` that gathers output like `writev(2)`
* Bug fixes and code refactor for compatibility with upcoming Column
Family feature.
### Performance Improvements
* Huge benchmark performance improvements by multiple efforts. For example, increase in readonly QPS from about 530k in 2.6 release to 1.1 million in 2.7 [1]
* Speeding up a way RocksDB deleted obsolete files - no longer listing the whole directory under a lock -- decrease in p99
* Use raw pointer instead of shared pointer for statistics: [5b825d](https://github.com/facebook/rocksdb/commit/5b825d6964e26ec3b4bb6faa708ebb1787f1d7bd) -- huge increase in performance -- shared pointers are slow
* Optimized locking for `Get()` -- [1fdb3f](https://github.com/facebook/rocksdb/commit/1fdb3f7dc60e96394e3e5b69a46ede5d67fb976c) -- 1.5x QPS increase for some workloads
* Implemented autovector, which allocates first N elements on stack. Most of vectors in RocksDB are small. Also, we never want to allocate heap objects while holding a mutex. -- [c01676e4](https://github.com/facebook/rocksdb/commit/c01676e46d3be08c3c140361ef1f5884f47d3b3c)
* Lots of efforts to move malloc, memcpy and IO outside of locks
