Welcome to NewsBits where you'll find the database and developer news from around the net for the week ending November 9th.

• IBM acquires Redhat
• Version 3.0 of Scylla is out
• PostgreSQL updates for all versions
• A minor version of MongoDB 3.4.18 is released
• Facebook open-sources AI
• and we also get the GraphQL Foundation from them, too
• A major release of JRuby is available
• ... GoCity to turn your Go code into a city plan.

Here's those bits in full...

Cloud Bits

IBM - Redhat

The news that you probably didn't miss was IBM's acquisition of Redhat. IBM and Redhat made a joint announcement indicating that the strategic move to leverage both company's strengths and position them as the #1 hybrid cloud provider.

Database Bits

Scylla

Scylla version 3.0 has arrived. Syclla announced the major release of it's open-source database that include some long-awaited new features. These features include support for concurrent OLTP and OLAP workloads without sacrificing latency and throughput, materialized views (we've been waiting for this!), secondary indexes that scale to any cluster size, and compatibility with Cassandra 3.x.

PostgreSQL

PostgreSQL releases updates to all supported versions of the databases including 11.1, 10.6, 9.6.11, 9.5.15, 9.4.20, and 9.3.25. It's also the final release (End-of-Life) for PostgreSQL 9.3 which will not receive any more bug or security fixes moving forward. The bug fixes include a fix to building issues on macOS Mojave, a memory leak found in SP-GiST index, and others. The security update only affects versions 10 and 11, where an SQL injection vulnerability was found in pg_upgrade and pg_dump that allows an attacker to run SQL statements with superuser privileges when a superuser runs pg_upgrade on or during a pg_dump/restore cycle. You can read more about the fixes and how to update in their annoucement.

MongoDB

A minor release of MongoDB was released for version 3.4. The latest minor version 3.4.18 includes a feature for specifying incoming and outgoing CA connections separately. It includes other fixes as well, but mostly for replication and queries, and a fix for mongorestore that now checks for errors when decoding the oplog.bson file. Check out the changelog for more details.

Developer Bits

Facebook

This week included a couple announcements by Facebook that their open-sourcing QNNPACK, FBGEMM, and Horizon, their open-source reinforcement learning platform, and created a new open-source foundation, GraphQL Foundation.

FBGEMM is a high-performance kernal library that optimizes on-CPU performance to accelerate deep learning models. Their blog post about FBGEMM includes a lot of the details, including how it works and performance testing.

QNNPACK (Quantized Neural Network PACKage) is also a kernal library, but built for mobile devices, and released as part of the PyTorch 1.0 platform. In their post about the library, they mention that it speeds up low-intensity convolutions used in state-of-the-art neural networks and outperforms other implementations on a number of phones.

Another announcement made this week was the open sourcing of Facebook's Horizon, a reinforcement learning platform built on PyTorch 1.0. It's an end-to-end reinforcement learning platform for large-scale production environments. That means that while it can run on a single GPU or CPU, it's really designed to work with large clusters using many GPUs at once.

GraphQL

Facebook also started the GraphQL Foundation born out of the adoption of GraphQL, the popular data query language that's used as an alternative to REST. The purpose of the forming the foundation is to drive growth and governance over GraphQL and continue to evolve it as a technology that's already widely used by a number of developers. It will be hosted by the Linux Foundation.

JRuby

JRuby, the Ruby language on the JVM, version 9.2.1.0 is released. The new major version is compatible with Ruby 2.5.x and stays in sync with C Ruby. It includes improvements and bug fixes for Java integration, support for Java 11 and it's Application Class Data Sharing, as well as 166 other fixes to the language. The release includes all of the Github issues resolved for this version.

And Finally ...

GoCity, visualize Go code in 3D. The visualization uses babylon.js to plot 3D structures and turn your Go code into a vast city. Check out their Github repository on how you can try it out on your own code.

NewsBits. News in bits, every Friday at Compose.