Welcome to NewsBits where you'll find the database, cloud and developer news from around the net for the week ending September 21st.

• Scylla 2.3 arrives.
• Updates for RabbitMQ.
• PostgreSQL 11 gets to Beta 4.
• A bump to MongoDB 3.6.
• Elasticsearch rollover bug fixed.
• Go and Rust at heart of Linkerd 2.0.
• Node.js 10.11 adds latest polish.
• Web/desktop tool Electron hits 3.0.
• And finally... Fluid dynamics and moon landings?.

Here's those bits in full...

Database Bits

Scylla

The Scylla 2.3 open source release is now out. New to the release are CQL datetime functions such as timestamptodate and timestamptounixtimestamp and Cassandra 2.2 compatible JSON operations including SELECT JSON, INSERT JSON and toJson()/fromJson() functions. There's improved tooling including ways to identify large partitions, an updated Scyllatop and iotune and a rewrite of all scripts that were in Bash to Python.

Still in the "Experimental" section are Materialized Views and Secondary Indexes. The former is catagorized in 2.3 as "feature-compatible with Cassandra 3.0, but is not considered production ready". Those features are now pencilled in to be production ready in Scylla 3.0.

RabbitMQ

RabbitMQ 3.7.8 has been released. This release focuses on improving compatibility with the Erlang/OTP 21 platform, introduced in RabbitMQ 3.7, and with fixing a range of bugs. Its very much a maintenance release; dive into the release notes for a full rundown of the changes.

PostgreSQL

PostgreSQL 11 Beta 4 is probably the last beta before the PostgreSQL 11 release candidates arrive. The Beta 4 announcement notes that one particular feature, the JIT compiler for queries, has now been switched off by default. The rest of the changes in the beta are predominantly fixes to stored procedures, parallelized index creation, reindexing, memory leaks in XMLTABLE and in supporting libraries and tools. If you're interested in the details, check out the PostgreSQL 11 Open Items page where the issues to release are tracked.

In other PostgreSQL 11 related news, PostGIS 2.5rc2 was released. PostGIS 2.5 for PostgreSQL 11 will include SP-Gist 2d and 3d support for space partitioned indexes, a feature introduced since the PostGIS 2.5 alpha which should allow for efficient indexing by location. More details of all the changes in the NEWS file.

MongoDB

There's been a minor release of MongoDB - 3.6.8 has been released with a number of fixes for the older MongoDB 3.6 branch. The majority of the changes affect sharding according to the changelog.

Elasticsearch

There's an Elasticsearch 6.4.1 update out. This fixes a bug in all versions which seems to have emerged in 6.4 where shards which rolled over couldn't be restarted. Details are on the Elasticsearch 6.4.0 release notes.

An additional caching issue for X-Pack security came up in the default non-open-source distribution of Elasticsearch. For Elasticsearch 5 user's there's also a small bump release, 5.6.12 with a singular bug fix.

Cloud Bits

Linkerd

Linkerd has been a service mesh for a number of platforms, including Kubernetes service. Now, the developers have announced that Linkerd 2.0 is generally available. What's new in 2.0 is two things. One is a huge rewrite in modern languages; Linkerd's proxies are now written in Rust to be small and fast (10MB RSS and sub-ms latency), while Linkerd's control plane is written in Go. The other thing is a change in philosophy. Rather than having to do the "big bang" of meshing all services at once, Linkerd 2.0 can be introduced as a "service sidecar" to one or two services to manage, diagnose and debug them, then grow out into a mesh organically. The sidecar can give dashboards of service success, latency and throughput, map dependencies and give live request views. Linkerd 2.0 is also focussed on Kubernetes, unlike the previous Linkerd 1.x. If you want a more in depth feel for Linkerd 2.0, check out this Hands on article and there's also this comparison with other meshes.

Developer Bits

Node.JS

And another Node.js 10 release lands. In 10.11.0, the changes are small - you can now get file types when you read a directory - while most of the changes are in docs, build and test. In October, Node 10 will become the new Node LTS release and so the lack of big changes is not a surprise.

Electron

Electron has brought web applications to the desktop. Whether thats a good or bad thing is open for discussion, but it has brought cross platform desktop support of Atom, Slack, VS Code, Discord, Wordpress and other applications. Now, Electron 3.0 has arrived. The update brings Chromium 66, Node 10.2, and V8 6.6 to the desktop enabler. There's also a selection of new features - for example, a way to tell if the app is running in development or production and a way to tell when Electron has initialized - and many bug fixes and enhancements. The interesting part of this Electron release is that the feedback program looped in all the major users as part of a process with a more defined "stable release" criteria. It'll be interesting to see how that works out in the coming months.

And finally...

Take the classic Moon Lander game and add fluid dynamics and you get Interplanetary Postal Service, a 13K JavaScript game which adds in fluid winds to one of the oldest challenges in computing, after naming. And out by one errors.

NewsBits. News in bits, every Friday at Compose.