5.1.0.BETA1 "Brahma" is out with reworked transaction handling

It's been a frantic couple of weeks at chez Infinispan with loads of hacking, presentations preparation, team meetings...etc and we're now proud to release Infinispan 5.1.0.BETA1 "Brahma".

For this first beta release, the transaction layer has been redesigned as explained by Mircea in this blog post. This is a very important step in the process of implementing some key locking improvements, so we're very excited about this! Thanks Mircea :)

There's a bunch of other little improvements, such as avoiding the use of thread locals for cache operations with flags. As a result, optimisations like the following are now viable:

AdvancedCache cache = ...
Cache forceWLCache = cache.withFlags(Flag.FORCE_WRITE_LOCK);
forceWLCache.get("voo");
forceWLCache.put("voo", "doo");
...

Previously each cache invocation would have required withFlags() to be called, but now you only need to do it once and you can cache the "flagged" cache and reuse it.

Another interesting little improvement is available for JDBC cache store users. Basically, database tables can now be discovered within an implicit schema. So, if each user has a different schema, the tables will be created within their own space. This makes it easier to manage environments where the JDBC cache store is used by multiple caches at the same time because management is limited to adding a user per application, as opposed to adding a user plus prefixing table names. Thanks to Nicolas Filotto for bringing this up.

Please keep the feedback coming, and as always, you can download the release from here and you get further details on the issues addressed in the changelog.

Cheers,
Galder