This chapter describes what new features are introduced in V14.0 and what upgrade tasks may be required of existing customers.
Volt Active Data V15 is a major release that includes further enhancements to the new configuration process, as well as general cleanup of old and obsolete functions. The key new features and enhancements in V15.0 include:
Unified Database Configuration for Kubernetes and Bare Metal — VoltDB V14 introduced YAML syntax for configuring the database on bare metal systems. V15 completes the transition to YAML for all systems by unifying the configuration properties used by both Kubernetes and bare metal. This means the property names and values are identical for both environments, wherever possible. (There are a few instances where platform differences cannot be resolved, even if the property names are the same. This is most notable in the area of TLS and security settings where Kubernetes secrets are recommended.)
To further simplify the development process, bare metal systems now accept configuration options in the
abbreviated format starting with deployment... or with the longer Kubernetes format starting with
cluster.config.deployment.... This offers you the choice, for example when doing development on bare
metal for production in Kubernetes, of using the full Kubernetes configuration syntax from the beginning or using the
shorter bare metal syntax during development and adding the two additional levels cluster and
config when moving to production.
Note that, although bare metal systems accept the longer Kubernetes syntax as input, the voltadmin get command will always return the configuration options in the shorter, bare metal format. See the appendices in Using VoltDB and the Volt Kubernetes Administrator's Guide for a complete list of configuration options. And see the following section Special Considerations for Existing Customers for a list of the few properties that have changed on bare metal between version 14 and 15.
New DATE datatype — Version 15 adds support for a new SQL datatype, DATE. DATE values represent a specific day between the dates of January 1, 1583 and December 31, 9999, inclusive. The new datatype can be used with the existing date and time functions such as DATEADD, DATEDIFF, and EXTRACT and can be used with the CAST() function to convert between dates and timestamps or between dates and VARCHAR strings. There is also a new function, CURRENT_DATE(), equivalent to CURRENT_TIMESTAMP(), that generates a DATE value representing the current date.
Support for mutual TLS — VoltDB V14.3 added the initial support for mutual TLS, also known as mTLS. Support has been enhanced in recent releases to ensure maximum compatibility with other configuration options, especially on the Kubernetes platform.
Debian Platform Support — Volt Active Data now supports Debian version 12.11 or later as a base platform.
Red Hat and Rocky Version 10 — This release adds support for Red Hat and Rocky version 10 and later as operating systems for production use.
Removing Obsolete Functionality — Over the life cycle of VoltDB, a number of older features were deprecated and replaced by improved and enhanced implementations. WIth the release of V15, the following deprecated features are being removed from the product:
Passive (master/replica) database replication
SHA-1 hashing of passwords
The querystats directive in sqlcmd and the @QueryStats system procedure
Documentation