These are the NewsBits from Compose for the week ending 7th July:

• Elasticsearch and Kibana updated
• A release date for Redis 4.0
• More PostgreSQL 10 features to look forward to
• Driver confusion with MySQL to end?
• MongoDB sends out a minor release
• A new RabbitMQ milestone
• A look at NoSQL architectures
• It's a 4.12 for Linux
• Oracle gets Rusty with OCI Railcar
• Chalk up your terminal output
• And Wikipedia – The Text Adventure.

Now read on...

Database Bits

• Elastic - Elastic have released Elastic Stack 5.5.0. This includes Elasticsearch 5.5.0 which now sports a Windows MSI Installer, keyword collations fields and an ip_range field type for indexing IPv6 ranges. Kibana 5.5.0 also arrived with improved filtering and filter editors, dashboard cloning, gauge and goal charts, region maps and field auto-completion when configuring visualization.

• Redis - Redis 4.0's release now has a date. A tweet from @antirez says it will now be available from July 14th. Redis 4.0 is bringing the modules – plug-in extensions for Redis, a new replication protocol, non-blocking deletes and flushing, better cache eviction and a MEMORY DOCTOR. More on that when it arrives.

• PostgreSQL - Looking forward to 10? This article on new querying features for JSON will wet your appetite for more. We're looking forward to declarative partitioning which should make partitioning in PostgreSQL much easier.

• MySQL - Also looking forward, MySQL 8.0 looks like it is going to simplify the maze of versioning that surrounds MySQL and client drivers and libraries. They've all had their own version scheme traditionally, but with this announcement it looks like they'll all finally fall into line and track the server version numbers.

• MongoDB - Another minor release quietly slips out with MongoDB 3.4.6. The changelog shows a solid set of fixes across the board, from sharding and replication to internal testing and no essential security fixes.

• RabbitMQ - The pace of milestone releases moves up with RabbitMQ 3.6.11 Milestone 3 released for testing. This now officially supports the updated Erlang/OTP 20 which we talked about two weeks ago.

• Architecture - A NoSQL Database Architectural Comparison(pdf) makes interesting reading if you want to compare the topologies, failover and caching of Cassandra, MongoDB, Riak, Couchbase and GridDB. The paper was written for Toshiba, makers of the AGPL-licensed GridDB.

Developer Bits

• Linux - Linux 4.12 arrived last week and, apart from it being a huge release with 1.2 million lines of code added there isn't much new. Why? Half of the changes are header files for AMD Vega support, and much of the rest is driver support updates. If you want the details, check out Kernelnewbies 4.12 roundup.

• Railcar - Oracle has released Railcar, an implementation of the OCI (Open Container Initiative) Container runtime specification. The thing that stands out is that Railcar is a Rust-based application. The Oracle Developers blog has an article that tells how the developers found Rust sat between C and Go and thats why they went with it. The question is where will Railcar go next...

• Chalk - Want to make your text based Node app more colorful? Check out Chalk which offers an expressive portable way to colorize terminal content. The new Chalk 2.0 release brings 256/Truecolor support to monochrome output.

And finally - It's not just the data, it's how you present it. Take Wikipedia: The Text Adventure, which turns Wikipedia into an entertaining geographical ramble through its pages. Don't get too lost!