Your weekly summary of Compose has news of those changes which may make your life easier and a rundown of the most recent database articles published.

Noteworthy Changes

Lifecycle and maintenance defined

At Compose we've had various protocols for handling the version changes of databases and how and when we do maintenance updates. We've decided to formalize these protocols in the Compose Database Version Lifecycle. This document encapsulates how we handle the somewhat fluid nature of what is supported, updates, unsupported, end-of-life and other endings that can happen in the life of an open source database.

Elasticsearch updates

Elasticsearch 2 and 5 users will find there are upgrade options available for both editions.

• Elasticsearch 5.x: Elasticsearch 5 users can update their deployments to version 5.6.3 which includes support for the Java High-Level REST Client and typeless parent/child handling along with many bug fixes and deprecated options. Most of those changes are detailed in the 5.6.0 release notes. There is another addition to Compose Elasticsearch 5.6.3; the Open Korean Text Analysis Plugin has been added to the available plugins.

• Elasticsearch 2.x: Elasticsearch 2 users can update to Elasticsearch 2.4.6 which only includes bug fixes for that the 2.x tree. The end of life for Elasticsearch 2.4.6 is approaching (February 2018) and given that, we recommend users looking at upgrading to Elasticsearch 5.x sooner rather than later. Composes "Restore from Backup" can take any backup you have of a 2.4.x database and restore it into an up-to-date 5.6.3 without touching your existing deployment and making it easy to test your application with the upgrade.

Compose Articles

This week saw the start of the Go Grand Tour and a look at the Elasticsearch 5.x Percolate Query:

• In Go and Compose - MongoDB, Elasticsearch and PostgreSQL, we dive into the Go Grand Tour examples starting with connecting to MongoDB, Elasticsearch and PostgreSQL. Part 2, next week.

• Time to Discover Space on Twitter using Elasticsearch's Percolate Query as we start building a data filtering engine.

That's it for this week's Noteworthy at Compose.

Read more articles about Compose databases - use our Curated Collections Guide for articles on each database type. If you have any feedback about this or any other Compose article, drop the Compose Articles team a line at articles@compose.com. We're happy to hear from you.