Apache Kudu Weekly Update July 26, 2016

Welcome to the eighteenth edition of the Kudu Weekly Update. This weekly blog post covers ongoing development and news in the Apache Kudu project.

Project news

• Kudu has graduated from the Apache Incubator and is now a Top-Level Project! All the details are in this blog post. Mike Percy and Todd Lipcon made a few updates to the website to reflect the project’s new name and status.

Development discussions and code in progress

• Dan Burkert contributed a few patches that repackage the Java client under org.apache.kudu in place of org.kududb. This was done in a backward-incompatible way, meaning that import statements will have to be modified in existing Java code to compile against a newer Kudu JAR version (from 0.10.0 onward). This stems from a discussion initiated in May. It won’t have an impact on C++ or Python users, and it isn’t affecting wire compatibility.

• Still on the Java-side, J-D Cryans pushed a patch that completely changes how Exceptions are managed. Before this change, users had to introspect generic Exception objects, making it a guessing game and discouraging good error handling. Now, the synchronous client’s methods throw KuduException which packages a Status object that can be interrogated. This is very similar to how the C++ API works.

  Existing code that uses the new Kudu JAR should still compile since this change replaces generic Exception with a more specific KuduException. Error handling done by string-matching the exception messages should now use the provided Status object.

• Alexey Serbin’s patch that adds Doxygen-based documentation was pushed and the new API documentation for C++ developers will be available with the next release.

• Todd has made many improvements to the ksck tool over the last week. Building upon Will Berkeley’s WIP patch for KUDU-1516, ksck can now detect more problematic situations like if a tablet doesn’t have a majority of replicas on live tablet servers, or if those replicas aren’t in a good state. ksck is also now faster when run against a large cluster with a lot of tablets, among other improvements.

• As mentioned last week, Dan has been working on adding add/remove range partition support in the C++ client and in the master. The patch has been through many rounds of review and testing and it’s getting close to completion. Meanwhile, J-D started looking at adding support for this functionality in the Java client.

• Adar Dembo is also hard at work on the master. The series of patches to have the tablet servers heartbeat to all the masters that he published earlier this month is getting near the finish line.

Want to learn more about a specific topic from this blog post? Shoot an email to the kudu-user mailing list or tweet at @ApacheKudu. Similarly, if you’re aware of some Kudu news we missed, let us know so we can cover it in a future post.