We are pleased to announce the general availability of Vitess 16.
Major themes in Vitess 16
Documentation improvements
In this release, the maintainer team has decided to put an emphasis on reviewing, editing, and rewriting the website documentation to ensure it's current with the code. With help from CNCF, we have also improved the search experience. We welcome feedback on the current iteration of the docs.
GA announcements
We are marking VDiff v2 as Generally Available or production-ready in v16. We now recommend that you use v2 rather than v1 going forward. Version 1 will be deprecated and eventually removed in future releases.
This new version of VDiff offers a much improved overall user experience, especially when migrating very large tables. You can read more about VDiff v2 in the Introducing VDiff V2 blog post.
VTOrc is now mandatory
VTOrc is a required component of Vitess starting from this release. You must run at least one instance of VTOrc in order for Vitess to automatically manage the backing MySQL clusters.
MySQL compatibility improvements
We have been making steady progress on adding query support for more MySQL constructs. In this release, we have added support for Views in Vitess. It is now possible to create views that access data across shards, and they will work as intended in Vitess. Note that this is considered an experimental feature. It will move to GA in a future release.
Other improvements
Support for native incremental backups and point-in-time recoveries has been added. It is now possible to take an incremental backup, starting with the last known (full or incremental) backup, up to either a specified (GTID) position or the current ("auto") position. Using these incremental backups, you can restore a backup up to a given point in time (GTID position) without relying on a binlog server. Note that this is only supported for the file-based builtin backup method, not for xtrabackup.
A new VEXPLAIN command has been introduced to help users gain more insight into query planning in Vitess. This gives users the ability to inspect the query plan produced by VTGate, all the queries executed on the MySQL instances, and the MySQL EXPLAIN output for the executed queries.
Try it out
We are very pleased with the great strides we have made with v16 and hope that you will be as well. We encourage all current users of Vitess and everyone who has been considering it to try this new release! We also look forward to your feedback, which can be provided via Vitess GitHub issues or Vitess Slack.