We are thrilled to announce the arrival of SingleStore 8.5! Highlights of the release include:
Vector Search Enhancements
Two important new features have been added to improve vector data processing and the performance of vector search.
Indexed ANN vector search facilitates creation of large-scale semantic search and generative AI applications. Supported index types include inverted file (IVF), hierarchical navigable small world (HNSW) and variants of both based on product quantization (PQ) – a vector compression method. The VECTOR type makes it easier to create, test, and debug vector-based applications. New infix operators are available for DOT_PRODUCT (<*>) and EUCLIDEAN_DISTANCE (<->) to help shorten queries and make them more readable.
SQL Improvements
- INSERT … ON DUPLICATE KEY… now supports a DELETE option, enabling streaming maintenance of aggregates, e.g. the total number of people currently viewing an online video stream.
- Name length limits for tables, views, and columns have increased to 256 characters (from 64) for easier porting of apps from other database products such as Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server.
Programmability Improvements
- Extensions are supported. These are packages of PSQL and Wasm-based functions, which can now be installed as a unit with a single command, rather than one at a time; this eases management of logical extension packages and improves sharing of extension code.
- New table%rowtype and tablecolumn%type notation is supported to allow easier creation and evolution of stored procedures and anonymous code blocks that need to declare variables with types that track table objects. This also makes it easier to port code from Oracle to SingleStore.
Monitoring Improvements
- Query history is now supported. This allows you to trace every occurrence of every query (above some runtime threshold you can set), including the query text, who ran it, when it ran, how long it took, and much more. This greatly simplifies application performance monitoring and tuning.
Performance Improvements
- ORDER BY/LIMIT queries now perform better under flexible parallelism.
- More than a dozen query optimization improvements including correlation statistics, LEFT JOIN optimizations, and multiple new query transformations.
JSON and Kai 
- An internal BSON type has been added for use by the Kai MongoDB® -compatible API. This dramatically improves compatibility with MongoDB when using the Kai interface.
- Improved JSON computed column matching, statistics, query optimizer rewrites, and query execution memory management
Miscellaneous Improvements
- Shallow table copy (CREATE TABLE … WITH SHALLOW COPY) copies a table using a copy-on-write approach, copying the metadata for a columnstore table, not the blobs. Blobs of the new table are shared with the original copy. This enables near-instant copy of large tables with minimal storage overhead; benefits include easier development and ability to backup whole tables in place, fast.
Expect several major improvements to come that will be made available in patch releases of 8.5, including Projections (secondary sort and shard keys), CDC out, Smart DR for cloud, and Database Branching for cloud.
There are so many features we can’t mention them all here. Please check the 8.5 release notes for full details!
Eric Hanson
Director of Product Management
SingleStore, Inc.
P.S. Sign up for our Jan. 24th launch event for this amazing release today! You’ll hear presentations and demos from the SingleStore experts about the valuable new features and benefits provided by this release and our latest cloud platform enhancements.