Welcome to NewsBits where you'll find the database and developer news from around the net for the week ending October 12th.

• PostgreSQL 11 RC1 is released
• As promised, Redis 5 RC6 is available
• MongoDB gets a minor update with 4.0.2
• Updates, a new home, and a playground for etcd
• Nvidia announces RAPIDS
• Powered by RAPIDS is BlazingDB's GPU powered SQL query engine
• Node 10.12.0 gets crypto key pair generation
• TypeScript is king in Loopback 4's GA announcement
• ScyllaDB release a performant set package for Go
• ... and understand how TLS connections work, and a make your own mobile phone

Here's those bits in full...

Database Bits

PostgreSQL

We're out of Betas and into the final stretch with the release of PostgreSQL 11 RC1. This is expected to be the the final version of PostgreSQL 11 before going GA October 18th. The announcement notes several fixes to partitioning by fixing the accidental ability to create multiple primary keys in partitions. If you're interested in the details what was fixed, take a look at PostgreSQL 11 Open Items to track the issues.

Redis

Another anticipated RC release is Redis 5 RC6. GA is still on the calendar for an October 17th release. In this release we got some critical bug fixes as well as others related to streams, and we can expect this is what the final version will look like before GA.

MongoDB

There's been a minor release of MongoDB - 4.0.3 that's been released with a number of fixes. One of the fixes is to --repair, a mongod flag which now handles repairing WiredTiger databases more robustly - it'll carry on repairing where it would have previously bailed out and restoring more data. Another is the reintroduction of the countDocuments functions that were mistakenly left out of version 4's shell. However, the changelog shows that most of the changes in this version affected sharding, replication, and storage.

etcd

Moving up to minor version to 3.3.10, etcd's changelog shows a lot of additions around monitoring and metrics of networks and servers, and several improvements to warning messages and debugging.

etcd is in the process of moving to etcd.io and have a new home for documentation . The documentation is still in progress, but they've got some great words for getting set up, monitoring, as well as client architecture and features.

... But that's not all. Check out the etcd playground. It lets get your feet wet setting up etcd as well as simulating how an etcd cluster works in real time using your own input.

Nvidia

Nvidia launched an open-source platform called RAPIDS that uses it's GPUs for accelerating data science and analytics pipelines. Developed with partners like IBM, HPE, Oracle, and Databricks, the platform is based on Python and uses Apache Arrow for in-memory database processing and will soon add Apache Spark as well. IBM is planning to bring RAPIDS to IBM Watson Studio and Watson Machine Learning, and IBM Cloud with GPU-enabled machines. Some RAPID's benefits are that it can accelerate machine learning processing times by up to 50x compared to CPU systems, and it includes interfaces similar to Pandas and Scikit libraries, so it will be familiar to data scientists who want to get started using it quickly.

BlazingDB

... and following on from that, BlazingDB announced the release of BlazingSQL, a free-to-use GPU-powered SQL engine built on top of RAPIDS, which let's you run SQL queries on enterprise data lakes using GPU memory. The project is still in it's infancy so we'll be looking out for some changes in the following months.

Developer Bits

Node

[Node.js] version 10.12.0 has been released. The changelog includes quite a few fixes, and changes especially to crypto features. One that stands out is the support for PEM-level encryption, and key-pair generation methods crypto.generateKeyPair and crypto.generateKeyPairSync to generate public and private key pairs supporting RSA, DSA, and ECC encryption methods.

LoopBack

IBM's Strongloop just announced that LoopBack 4, the Node.js framework for building APIs, is now GA. The announcement highlights its move away from a pure JavaScript core to being rewritten in TypeScript and ES2017, and a new developer REST API experience following the OpenAPI spec. Basic support for integrating 3rd party services SOAP, REST, and gRPC has also been added.

ScyllaDB

While Go's set data structure package by Fatih Arslan has been deprecated for some time, ScyllaDB has released it's own type-safe port of that package called go-set. They've made some significant performance increases with the benchmarks to prove it.

Finally

It's something that you probably use every day, but don't quite understand how it works ... TLS connections. We've found a handy illustrated guide to how TLS connections work.

... and something else with a ring to it. MAKERPhone, a DIY mobile phone, is in the early stages of its Kickstarter. If you like building things with Python on an Arduino and want to use it too, check out their promo video and see if it rings with you.