Virtuoso Open Source Edition News (2008)

Later Years

• 2012 to present
• 2011
• 2010
• 2009

2008

2008-11-05: Announcing Virtuoso Open-Source Edition v5.0.9

This version includes significant performance optimizations to the SQL Engine, SPARQL+RDF Engine, ODBC and JDBC drivers.

New features include

• An Excel mime-type output option in the SPARQL endpoint
• Enhanced triple options for bif:contains plus new options for transitivity
• New RDF-izer Cartridges for the Sponger RDF Middleware Layer
• Incorporation of UMBEL lookups and Named Entity Extraction into RDF-izer Cartridges
• Support for very large HTTP client requests
• A sparql-auth endpoint with digest authentication for using SPARUL via SPARQL Protocol
• New commands for the Ubiquity Firefox plugin

There are also minor bug-fixes

• memory leaks
• SQL query syntax handling
• SPARQL 'SELECT DISTINCT'
• XHTML and javascript validation and other UI issues in the ODS application suite

For more details, see the release notes.

2008-08-27: Announcing Virtuoso Open-Source Edition v5.0.8

This version focuses on performance optimizations and speed enhancements:

• SQL compiler is now re-entrant
• Self-Join optimizations exposed at JDBC Driver level (as was already the case with ODBC)
• SPARQL engine and SPARQL-BI extension optimizations have been merged
• TriG? serialization format for RDF is now supported alongside RDFa, N3, Turtle, and RDF/XML
• Additional Sponger Cartridges for Digg, FriendFeed?, and CrunchBase?
• Improved graph quality and fidelity from existing Cartridges (especially Freebase, eBay, Amazon, Google, Yahoo, and many others)
• Improved handling of and bug fixes relating to the `OPTIONAL' SPARQL keyword
• Self-Dereferencing fixes (e.g., Sponger was not properly de-referencing its own Proxy URIs)

On the ODS front, the following have been addressed:

• More flexible Mapping service model based on new OAT-based Mapping Control (which also includes a "province" locator)
• Improved SyncML integration with Briefcase folders
• Gem URL fixes for Atom, RSS, and RDF feeds

For more details, see the release notes.

2008-07-17: Announcing Virtuoso Open-Source Edition v5.0.7

New

• Fully operational Native Graph Model Storage Providers for the Jena & Sesame Frameworks.

Licensing change

• The Jena and Sesame providers have been added to the "Client Protocol Driver exemptions" paragraph in the VOS License.

Improvements

• Better support for alternate RDF indexing schemes
• Parallelization of RDF sponger operations across multiple RDF data-sources concurrently
• New Sponger Cartridges and enhancements to the existing Cartridge collection
• Inference engine optimizations for subclass and subproperty that efficiently handle taxonomies numbering tens of thousands of classes.
• owl:equivalentClass and owl:equivalentProperty inference support.
• Dynamic handling of host component of IRIs; host component is now flexible enough to painlessly handle multiple homing of domains and host name component changes; no duplicate host name data storage required via [URIQA] section of INI
• SPARQL optimizations to improve LIMIT and OFFSET handling
• JDBC driver has new connect options, smaller memory footprint and optimized batch support
• ODS applications now support SyncML

Documentation Additions

• How to read query plans and how to use the key performance meters
• How to diagnose SPARQL queries and how to decide what indexing scheme is right for each RDF use case
• How to debug RDF views
• Better Documentation on SPARQL extensions and options
• An updated RDF View example based on the Northwind demonstration database that reflects underlying enhancements

Bug Fixes

• Generally improved safety of built-in functions, better argument checking.
• Verified UTF8 international character support in all RDF use cases, SQL client/SPARQL protocol/all data formats.

For more details, see the release notes.

2008-03-28: Announcing Virtuoso Open-Source Edition v5.0.6

On the RDF side, the bitmap intersection join has been optimized so that it is now typically twice as efficient as an equivalent nested loop join.

In some cases XML trees in the object position in RDF quads were incorrectly indexed, leading to failure to retrieve quads. This is fixed and should problems occur in existing databases, they can be corrected by simply dropping and re-creating an index.

The cost model has been further tuned. We have run the TPC-H queries with larger databases and have profiled it extensively. There are improvements to locking, especially for concurrency of transactions with large shared lock sets, as is the case in the TPC-H queries. The rules stipulate that these have to be run with repeatable read. There are also optimizations for decimal floating point.

As part of the completion of our Business Intelligence extensions to SPARQL (SPARQL-BI), we released a sampling of TPC-H queries translated into SPARQL, and integrated this into the standard demonstration database. The new demo database provides a live sample of the TPC-H schema and instance data in linked-data form, complete with SPARQL-BI variants of the standard TPC-H queries. Relational-to-RDF model-mapping is now demonstrably mature and robust enough for enterprise-grade business-intelligence applications.

For more details, see the release notes.

2008-02-12: Announcing Virtuoso Open-Source Edition v5.0.5

The previous release, 5.0.4, was short-lived due to a problem in SPARQL-to-SQL code-generation, so this announcement addresses the new features introduced over and above version 5.0.3:

In the core Database Engine: Added the LUBM benchmark for RDF data managers to testsuite; a check for backup/restore status; optimizations and an inxop option for bitmap indexes.

In the areas of RDF and SPARQL: Support for xsl:float; Sponger cartridges for SVG, XBRL and HR-XML documents; URL-rewrite rules for XBRL; additional SPARQL engine optimizations.

In the ODS Applications Suite: New support for Meaning of a Tag (MOAT); Support for Identity and authentications standards such as OpenID 2.0 and OAuth; additional ODS generated dereferenceable URIs; enhanced Wiki search; improvements to Calendar.

Additionally, there are the following bug-fixes: In the core database: Problems with FTP server and HTTP headers; saved unnecessary seeks in bitmap checks; fixed the 64-bit range of IRI and row IDs; various minor bug-fixes and compiler-warnings.

In the ODS Applications Suite: Fixed ATOM protocol upstreaming, Creole markup, docbook and invalid HTML generation in ODS-Wiki; improvements to SIOC based RDF instance data in relation to ODS-Calendar todo-lists; a new UI for system navigation.

Previous Years

• 2007
• 2006

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