This Month in TiKV - September 2019

Ana Hobden

October 18, 2019

Wonderful day! Welcome to the third edition of ‘This Month in TiKV’, covering September 2019.

News

This month our team made one TiKV minor release (v3.0.4)! This release includes bug fixes and minor, backwards compatible features.

You can review the changelogs here:

3.0.4

Upgrading? Please take note of these things:

There is a new batch split region command.
There is a new grpc-memory-pool-quota configuration option.

Reading materials

Here are some articles our contributors have published over the last month:

@breeswish published an article teaching about TiKV’s MVCC implementation (Chinese).
@nrc talked on his blog about migrating projects from Futures 0.1 to 0.3.
@yiwu-arbug and @pentium3 write about automatically tuning TiKV with AutoTiKV (Chinese).

Notable PRs

@overvenus submitted a PR to add tests for our upcoming backup mechanism #5486.
@overvenus enabled the backup feature #5476.
@5kbpers added some traits related to our ongoing engine abstraction #5445.
@5kbpers allowed the handling of read index requests with a lease, saving 1 round trip #5401.
@niedhui forwarded our efforts to use new, more efficient codecs in our coprocessor #5496.
@niedhui updated some of our cryptographic dependencies #3886.
@jing118 added some metrics regarding jemalloc #5448.
@aknuds1 added a default --pd-endpoint pointing to localhost #5427.
@nrc improved our use of unsafe in TiKV #5413.
@nrc pruned around 11% of our dependencies, resulting in faster builds and no more warnings from cargo audit #5454.
@brson extracted the sst_importer module as part of our ongoing modularization efforts #5438.
@hoverbear re-enabled the use of cargo run by specifiying the default-members #5439.
@hoverbear made sure jemalloc was only a depedency if using the jemalloc feature #5299

Notable issues

@disksing opened an issue regarding how to best handle TiKV panics #5564.
@nrc posted an issue regarding TiKV adopting async/await #5542.
@siddontang suggested we use an independent arena for gRPC allocation #5472.

Current projects

Here’s some of the things our contributors have been working on over the last month:

@brson, @5kbpers, and @akunds1 is continuing to work on our engine abstraction.
@zhouqiang-cl and his team are working on further improving the sre-bot.
@overvenus has been leading the efforts to finish the backup feature.

If any of these projects sound like something you’d like to contribute to, let us know on our chat and we’ll try to help you get involved.

New contributors

We’d like to welcome the following new contributors to TiKV and thank them for their work!

If you’d like to get involved, we’d love to help you get started. You might be interested in tackling one of these issues. If you don’t know how to begin, please leave a comment and somebody will help you out. We’re also very keen for people to contribute documentation, tests, optimizations, benchmarks, refactoring, or other useful things.

This Week in TiDB

For more detailed and comprehensive information about TiDB and TiKV, we have weekly updates. The following cover September,