RumbleDB 1.16

It is our pleasure to announce the release of RumbleDB 1.16 "Shagbark Hickory" beta.

RumbleDB takes XQuery's little cousin, JSONiq, to the Petabyte level on large scale clusters -- but also feels right at home on your 8-core laptop where it seamlessly spreads the processing of your disk data over all your cores.

RumbleDB has also become a Swiss army knife with which you can easily convert your datasets between all kinds of formats (JSON, Parquet...) as well as clean up, structure, normalize, validate your data and feed it right into Machine Learning pipelines (Rumble ML) -- all within the JSONiq language.

As always, it remains free and open source on http://www.rumbledb.org and is especially useful in a teaching context as we now have several universities using them in their DB courses.

There is a public sandbox accessible in this notebook:

https://colab.research.google.com/github/RumbleDB/rumble/blob/master/RumbleSandbox.ipynb

New features include the following (many thanks to our users who asked for some of them -- this release was very user-centric):

- there is a new --query parameter to enter your query directly on the command line (no need to save it to a file any more)

- there is a new --shell-filter parameter for modifying the way the output is shown if you work in shell mode (e.g. --shell-filter 'jq . -S -C' for pretty printing with jq)

- there are new output formats: TYSON (www.tyson-spec.org) for labeling each value (also nested) with its type, json with stricter semantics (top-level strings are quoted) in addition to the other formats (parquet, csv, etc). The default remains json-xml-hybrid which doesn't quote top-level strings, similar to what happens with XQuery.

- there is a new JSound (www.jsound-spec.org) validator page in the RumbleDB server, and there is one publicly available at

http://public.rumbledb.org:9090/jsound-validator.html

- you can define user-defined atomic types with the JSound verbose syntax: the builtin atomic types and facets are the same as XML Schema.

- fixes in the serialization of floats and doubles to be more W3C-conformant

- many bug fixes (we now use the W3C XQuery test suite actively to follow the standard as close as we can and hunt for bugs)