Release Notes

The follow page details the fixes made at each Phoenix release.

Phoenix v 1.2.1

Improve performance of multi-point and multi-range queries (20-1000x)
Support TopN queries (3-70x faster than Hive)
Declare primary key columns as ascending/descending
Salt tables declaratively to prevent hot spotting
Specify columns dynamically at query time
Write Phoenix-compliant HFiles from Pig scripts and Map/Reduce jobs
Support SELECT DISTINCT
Leverage essential column family feature
Bundle command line terminal interface
Specify scale and precision on decimal type
Support fixed length binary type
Add TO_CHAR, TO_NUMBER, COALESCE, UPPER, LOWER, and REVERSE built-in functions
Requires HBase 0.94.4 or above (HBase 0.94.7 recommended)

Performance improvement of approximately 10% for aggregate queries and 25% for non aggregate queries thanks to the great work by Lars Hofhansl and the rest of the HBase team.
Not backward compatible due to new methods introduced on the HBase RegionScanner interface.
Meta data on each Phoenix table is automatically modified upon the first connection to a cluster due to an HBase change in behavior in class resolution for coprocessors. Each Phoenix table is disabled, modified by nulling out the jar file path for the Phoenix coprocessors, and then re-enabled. The change is transparent, but the tables will be inaccessible while disabled.
Summary of improvements
- Support for HBase 0.94.4 and above
- Port number specified on connection string is honored
- Root node may be specified on connection string, following the zookeeper quorum and optional port number
- SQL exceptions include SQL state and error code
- Prevent potential OOM error during DROP TABLE, DELETE, and UPDATE SELECT when executed in coprocessor by batching mutations based on phoenix.mutate.batchSize config value
- Fixes for multi-byte support for built-in string manipulation functions
- Fixes for building and running tests on Mac
- Added support for running FindBugs
- Added support for building Javadocs
Complete list of fixed issues [here] (https://github.com/forcedotcom/phoenix/issues?milestone=2&state=closed)
Requires HBase 0.94.4 or above.

Known bugs include:
- Port number specified in connection string is ignored. The default port is always used. The workaround, if not using the default port, is to specify the port number in your hbase-site.xml config file
- OOM errors occur when running tests on Mac, leading to lots of failures
- Multi-byte tests fail when running on the Mac. Workaround is to change the default encoding.
Requires HBase 0.94.2 or 0.94.3.