Tuesday 31 October 2017

Infinispan coming to Duchess France and Devoxx Belgium !




This week, 2nd November, Galder and I will be presenting at Duchess France Meetup in Paris our "Streaming Data Workshop" : a 3h hours hands on lab that showcases a slightly simplified streaming architecture built on top of Infinispan and Vert.x and running on OpenShift

If you are in Paris, the Duchess France workshop is actually full; if you are planning to assist Devoxx Belgium this year, the workshop will take place the 6th of November there.


Cheers,
Katia 

Friday 27 October 2017

Infinispan 9.2.0.Alpha2 & 9.1.2.Final released

Dear Infinispan Community,

We have 2 new releases ready for everyone. We have our newest and greatest, 9.2.0.Alpha2 and an updated Final for our stable branch 9.1.2. As usual, both can be found on our download page.

9.2.0.Alpha2 contain the following new features

  • New Counters can be removed ISPN-8093
  • Interoperability between JSON and Protobuf, allowing to retrieve Protobuf content (written via Hot Rod) as JSON via Rest; also JSON documents written via Rest can be automatically converted to Protobuf and indexed. ISPN-7422
  • Wildcard cache configurations allowing for multiple caches from 1 config ISPN-8379
  • Reactive streams based iterator implementation providing better throughput and less resources usage ISPN-7865
  • An experimental evalAll like method on the LockedStream interface allowing for exclusive operation on entries and a return value ISPN-8310

9.1.2.Final and  9.2.0.Alpha both added

  • Updates to third party JGroups, Hibernate and Hibernate Search
  • Off heap improvements and fixes for Query & Encoding

Besides these there were also quite a few bug fixes and code clean ups. Full details of the new features and enhancements included in this release can be found here and here.

We have even more exciting features still coming up for Infinispan 9.2. Thank you for following us and stay tuned!

The Infinispan Team

Monday 23 October 2017

Thanks Basel One 2017!

Thanks a lot to all attendees at Basel One 2017, it was great fun presenting about Infinispan, OpenShift and Vert.x topics just around the corner from my house :)

The slides for my talk can be found here. The code and scripts demo that I showed can be found here. I've also uploaded step-by-step instructions for the live-coding done during the talk.



Cheers,
Galder

Friday 20 October 2017

Cache Store Batch Operations

Infinispan 9.1.x introduces batch write and delete operations for cache stores. The introduction of batching should greatly improve performance when utilising write-behind cache stores, using putAll operations and committing transactions in non-transactional stores.


CacheWriter Interface Additions


The CacheWriter interface has been extended so that it exposes two additional methods: deleteBatch and writeBatch.  For the sake of backwards compatibility a default implementation of these methods is provided, however if your cache store is able to utilise batching we strongly recommend you create your  own implementations. The additional methods and docs are show below: 



Updated Stores


Currently the JDBC, JPA, RocksDB and Remote stores have all been modified to take advantage of these latest changes.


Configuration Changes


As each store implementations has different batching capabilities, it was necessary to introduce a max-batch-size attribute to the AbstractStoreConfiguration. This attribute defines the maximum number of entries that should be included in a single batch operation to the store. If a value less than one is provided, then the underlying store implementation should not place a upper limit on the number of entries in a batch. 

Deprecated Attributes

Both TableManipulationConfiguration#batchSize and JpaStoreConfiguration#batchSize have been deprecated, as they serve the same purpose as AbstractStoreConfiguration#maxBatchSize.

Store Benchmark


To measure the impact of batch writes on Cache.putAll, we created a simple benchmark to compare the performance of Infinispan 9.1.1.Final (with batching) and 9.0.3.Final (without).  The benchmark consisted of 20 threads inserting 100000 cache entries as fast as possible into a cache via putAll; with each putAll operation containing 20 cache entries and the max-batch-size of each store being set to 20. The table below shows the average time taken for each store type after the benchmark was executed three times.


Store Type 9.0.3.Final 9.1.1-Final Latency Decrease
JdbcStringBasedStore 29368ms 2597ms 91.12%
JPAStore 30798ms 16640ms 45.97%
RocksDBStore 1164ms 209ms 82.04%

The benchmark results above clearly show that performance is increased dramatically when utilising batch updates at the store level.


Conclusions


Infinispan 9.1.x introduces batching capabilities to the CacheWriter interface in order to improve performance. If you currently utilise a custom cache store, we strongly recommend that you provide your own implementation of the delete and write batch methods. 

If you have any feedback on the CacheWriter changes, or would like to request some new features/optimisations, let us know via the forumissue tracker or the #infinispan channel on Freenode.

Wednesday 18 October 2017

Infinispan coming to Basel One 2017!


Tomorrow, 19th October, I'll be presenting at Basel One 2017 a talk on "Streaming Data Analysis with Kubernetes", where I'll be combining OpenShift, Infinispan and Vert.x to demonstrate how to process streaming data.

If you're in Basel and want to find out more about these technologies, make sure you come! The talk is at 16:00 :D

Cheers,
Galder

Friday 6 October 2017

Infinispan 9.2.0.Alpha1 released

Dear Infinispan Community,

Today we continue with our time-boxed releases, this time on 9.2 release branch! We prepared The Infinispan 9.2.0.Alpha1 for you. As usual, it can be found on our download page.

9.2.0.Alpha1 brings Infinispan MultimapCache - a new distributed and clustered collection type that maps keys to values in which each key can contain multiple values. We rolled out support for embedded cache mode, but upcoming releases will have support for other Infinispan modes, including client invocation through hotrod.

Aside from MultimapCache we also include the usual slew of bug fixes, clean ups, and general improvements. Full details of the new features and enhancements included in this release can be found here.

We have a lot more exciting features coming up on Infinispan 9.2 branch. Thank you for following us and stay tuned!

The Infinispan Team

Monday 2 October 2017

Better Late than Never: Remote Cache collections

One of the main benefits of Infinispan extending the java.util.Map interface when we introduced our Cache interface  was that users would immediately be able to use a well established and familiar API.

The unfortunate thing about this relationship is that now the Cache interface also has to implement all of the other methods such as keySet, values and entrySet. Originally Infinispan didn't implement these collections or returned an immutable copy (requiring all elements to be in memory). Neither choice is obviously desirable.

This all changed with ISPN-4836 which provided backing implementations of keySet, values and entrySet collections. This means that all methods were now provided and would keep up to date with changes to the underlying Cache and updates to these collections would be persisted down to the Cache. The implementation also didn't keep a copy of all contents and instead allowed for memory efficient iteration. And if the user still wanted to use a copy they could still do that, by iterating over the collection and copying themselves. This later spring boarded our implementation of Distributed Stream as well.

The problem was that the RemoteCache was left in the old state, where some things weren't implemented and others were copies just like how embedded caches used to be.
Well I can now gladly say with the release of Infinispan 9.1 that RemoteCache now has backing implementations of keySet, values and entrySet implemented via ISPN-7900. Thus these collections support all methods on these collections and are backed by the underlying RemoteCache.

Unfortunately the Stream methods on these collections are not distributed like embedded, but we hope to someday improve that as well. Instead these streams must iterate over the cache to perform the operations locally. By default these will pull 10,000 entries at a time to try to make sure that memory is not overburdened on the client. If you want to decrease this number (less memory - lower performance) or increase (more memory - higher performance) you can tweak this by changing the batchSize parameter via ConfigurationBuilder or infinispan.client.hotrod.batch_Size if you use a property based file.

You can read more about this and the remote iterator which drives these collections on our user guide.

We hope you find that this improves your usage of RemoteCaches in the future by allowing you to have backed collections that also allow you to use the improvements of Java 8 with Streams.

If you have yet you can acquire Infinispan 9.1.1 or the latest stable version at http://infinispan.org/download/