Big news. Our new version is here – and Exasol 7.1 is the fastest, most advanced version of our Loading...analytics database ever.
With Exasol 7.1 you get all the benefits of our most recent major update, Exasol 7.0 – including better performance in data vault, more flexibility to deal with structured/semi-structured data, and Loading...deep learning capabilities with the introduction of GPUs. But you also gain significant speed and performance increases across the board, plus greater concurrency limits.
Exasol 7.1 – new TPC-H scores
Thanks to the work of our developers and engineers, with Exasol 7.1 we’ve recorded outstanding results in a new TPC-H benchmark across three categories. Exasol has maintained its position as the undisputed leader – by a significant margin – for both raw performance and price-performance for over twelve years. Most recently, with Exasol 7.1, we ran benchmarks for 10 TB, 30 TB and 100 TB using AMD EPYC™ 7543 series processor-based servers.
“We ran Loading...TPC-H benchmark tests in 2019, including the 10TB category. This time, we have not only improved on this previous result, but also ran a new test on 100TB, also beating our own previous performance records from 2014 significantly,” said Mathias Golombek, our CTO. “We are extremely proud of how well our database performs on these independent benchmarks, which are testament to the speed and TCO predictability we deliver for all our customers.”
With the recent update, query performance results from our internal labs indicate significant performance improvements for TPC-H like workloads. Our tests show that Exasol 7.1 gives users a 5% speed-up right out of the box.
Performance upgrades across the board
When it comes to row level security, performance is up once again. Exasol 7.1 uses Lua for lightning-fast virtual schemas, which are used to implement row-level security.
Our test lab shows Exasol 7.1 reduces the overhead for row level security access to almost nothing. Users will no longer see any performance difference when accessing data directly compared to accessing data in protected mode.
Compile times have also been reduced. Exasol 7.1 delivers drastically shorter compile times for most complex scenarios, especially for complex queries with nested views containing many analytic functions. In many cases, our lab showed reductions in these scenarios by a factor of two – sometimes even more.
With Exasol 7.1, access to metadata is faster. In Exasol 7.0 we introduced lock-free metadata access. Now with Exasol 7.1, every query accessing metadata is automatically executed lock-free. The gains are evident in the greater volumes of metadata managed in the cluster.
Our lab tested on a 4-node cluster shows significant improvement for a large number of users, roles and privileges. For larger clusters we expect even more impressive improvements.
Pushing the limits with 7.1
Exasol 7.1 isn’t just faster. It pushes concurrency limits further too. We’ve relaxed the definition of ‘active users’. Users can define rules to better manage active sessions by defining role-based query timeouts and idle timeouts.
Now, Exasol 7.1 doesn’t distinguish prepared statements. Instead, prepared statements come in two execution modes: ‘prepare’ and ‘execute prepared’. They’re only treated as active during the ‘execute prepared’ phase, freeing up slots for other concurrent executions.
We’ve also introduced OpenID Connect authentication – an additional authentication method for database users besides username/password, LDAP and Kerberos. This enables secure single-sign-on with all tools that are connected to the same identity, which makes signing in quicker and access management simpler for larger enterprises.
Exasol 7.1 is available for download now. To learn more about Exasol’s unrivalled performance, visit our TPC-H page.