ArangoJS, the official ArangoDB JavaScript client, has been updated to version 3.7.0. The new release features significant performance improvements in Node.js and io.js. The dependency on the third-party request module has been replaced with a thin wrapper around node’s own http module, bringing a 3-4x performance improvement for consecutive requests by maintaining a connection pool.

During the last weeks we’ve released our new deployment tool for cloud computing platforms with how-to’s for Google Compute Engine and Digital Ocean support.

Today we show how to deploy an ArangoDB cluster on Amazon Web Services with a single command.

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

To easy-deploy an ArangoDB cluster on AWS you just need to install the official awscli, download a single bash script and watch the tool take care of the rest for you. Your aws account needs permission for creating instances, adding ssh-keypairs and managing security groups.

wget..

While the optional configuration field in Foxx manifests had experimental support all the way back to ArangoDB 2.1, the feature was previously undocumented and not well understood. The upcoming ArangoDB 2.6 release officially introduces Foxx configurations, allowing you to make your existing Foxx apps more re-usable and to make better use of third-party apps.

Let’s say your Foxx app needs an API key to make a request to a third-party service using the request module introduced in ArangoDB 2.5. Without using configurations, your code might contain the hard-coded API key:

Another performance improvement could be accomplished in the latest devel-branch: The handling of large IN-lists. Those become much faster than in the previous releases. Large IN-lists are normally used when comparing attribute or index values against some big array of lookup values or keys provided by the application.

ArangoDB 2.6 comes with a specialized API for bulk document lookups. The new API allows fetching multiple documents from the server using a single request, making bulk document retrieval more efficient than when using one request per document to fetch.

Provided the documents keys are known, all the client application needs to do is to call the collection’s lookupByKeys method:

This post is about improvements for the fulltext index in ArangoDB 2.6. The improvements address the problem that non-string attributes were ignored when fulltext-indexing.

Effectively this prevented string values inside arrays or objects from being indexed. Though this behavior was documented, it was limited the usefulness of the fulltext index much. Several users requested the fulltext index to be able to index arrays and object attributes, too.

We’ve been using Callgrind with its powerful frontend KCachegrind for quiet some time to analyse where the hot spots can be found inside of ArangoDB. One thing always accounting for a huge chunk of the resource usage was string comparison. Yes, string comparison isn’t as cheap as one may think, but its been even a bit more than one would expect. And since much of the business of a database is string comparison, its used a lot.

ArangoDB and V8 use the ICU Library for these purposes (with no alternatives on the market) – so basically we heavily rely on the performance of the ICU library...

Max Neunhöffer from ArangoDB shows an use case for multi-model NoSQL databases on Strata + Hadoop World 2015 in London. Join his Session on 6th of May.

Multi-model databases and the art of aircraft maintenance

We describe a case study in aircraft fleet management, where we needed a database that would store data about all the different parts and subunits of an aircraft. A single aircraft already contains some 6,000,000 parts, not counting components.

The particular structure of the queries arising naturally from day-to-day processes quickly led to the insight that no single data model was..

While in search for further AQL query optimizations last week, we found that intermediate AQL query results were copied one time too often in some cases.

Precisely, the data that a query’s ReturnNode will return to the caller was copied into the ReturnNode’s own register. With ReturnNode’s never modifying their input data, this demanded for something that is called return-value optimization in compilers.

This version is deprecated. Download the new version of ArangoDB

The third maintenance release for ArangoDB 2.5 is available for download. This maintenance release is to address some issues in ArangoDB 2.5 and to support future releases.