Anyone who has ever worked with our JavaScript framework Foxx was faced at some point with the challenge to install its Foxx service in its current ArangoDB instance or to replace the installed service with local code changes. This is not a big deal and can easily be done through ArangoDB’s WebUI. However, we developers always want to become more productive and clicking through a graphical UI is not the best way. Furthermore, this procedure is almost impossible to use in an automated deployment process. That’s why we decided to develop a node-based CLI tool to manage Foxx services, called ..

This year we got a lot of requests from our customers to provide Spring Data support for ArangoDB. So we listened and teamed up with one of our bigger customers from the financial sector to develop a Spring Data implementation for ArangoDB. We have also made an extensive demo on how to use Spring Data ArangoDB with an example data set of Game of Thrones characters and locations. So, Spring is not only coming… it is already there!

The newest release 4.3.2 of the official ArangoDB Java driver comes with load balancing for cluster setups and advanced fallback mechanics.

Load balancing strategies

Round robin

There are two different strategies for load balancing that the Java driver provides. The first and most common strategy is the round robin way. Round robin does, what the name already assumes, a round robin load balancing where a list of known coordinators in the cluster is iterated through. Each database operation uses a different coordinator than the one before.

With the 3.2 release, ArangoDB comes with version 1.1 of the binary protocol VelocyStream. VelocyStream is a bi-directional async binary protocol which supports sending messages pipelined, multiplexed, uni-directional or bi-directional. The messages themselves are VelocyPack objects.

Currently we are diving deeper into the Apache Spark world. We started with an implementation of a Spark-Connector written in Scala. The connector supports loading of data from ArangoDB into Spark and vice-versa. Today we release a first prototype with an aim of including our community into the development process early to build a product that fits your needs. Your feedback is more than welcome!

The upcoming 3.1 release comes with a binary protocol – VelocyStream – to transport VelocyPack (internal storage format of ArangoDB introduced with the 3.0 release) data between ArangoDB and client applications. VelocyPack stores a superset of JSON, is more compact and has a fast attribute lookup. On the other hand, VelocyStream allows to send VelocyPack in an optimized form over the network. We think it would be the right time to update our official Java Driver to modernize it and to let it be the first to fully support VelocyStream.