[ANNOUNCE] HBase 0.99.2 (developer preview release) is now available for download

[Enis Söztutar <en...@apache.org>]

The HBase Team is pleased to announce the immediate release of HBase 0.99.2.
Download it from your favorite Apache mirror [1] or maven repository.

THIS RELEASE IS NOT INTENDED FOR PRODUCTION USE, and does not contain any
backwards or forwards compatibility guarantees (even within minor versions
of
0.99.x). Please refrain from deploying this over important data. Use latest
0.98.x release instead. HBase 0.99.2 is a "developer preview" release, and
an odd-numbered release as defined in [2].

0.99.2 is the last planned release from 0.99.x line of developer preview
releases.Please use this release as a test bed for the upcoming HBase-1.0
release. Report any encountered problems or features that you think need
fixing before 1.0. This release also contains some API changes, and
deprecation of older APIs which won't be supported in 2.0 series. Please
give them a try and let us know what you think. All contribution in terms
of testing, benchmarking, checking API / source /wire compatibility,
checking out documentation and further code contribution is highly
appreciated. 1.0 will be the first series in the 1.x line of releases
which are expected to keep compatibility with previous 1.x releases. Thus
it
is very important to check the client side and server side APIs for
compatibility and maintainability concerns for future releases.

0.99.2 builds on top of all the changes that is in the 0.99.1 and 0.99.0
releases (an overview can be found at [4,5]). The theme of (eventual) 1.0
release is to become a stable base for future 1.x series of releases.
1.0 release will aim to achieve at least the same level of stability of
0.98 releases without introducing too many new features.

The work to clearly mark and differentiate client facing  APIs, and
redefine
some of the client interfaces for improving semantics, easy of use and
maintainability has continued in 0.99.2 release. Remaining work can
be found in HBASE-10602. Marking/remarking of interfaces with
InterfaceAudience
has also been going on, which will identify areas for compatibility (with
clients, coprocessors and dependent projects like Phoenix) for future
releases.

The work to clearly mark and differentiate client facing  APIs, and
redefine
some of the client interfaces for improving semantics, easy of use and
maintainability has continued in 0.99.2 release. Marking/remarking of
interfaces with InterfaceAudience has also been going on (HBASE-10462),
which will identify areas for compatibility (with clients, coprocessors
and dependent projects like Phoenix) for future releases.

0.99.2 contains 190 issues fixed on top of 0.99.1. Some other notable
improvements
in this release are
 - [HBASE-12075] - Preemptive Fast Fail
 - [HBASE-12147] - Porting Online Config Change from 89-fb
 - [HBASE-12354] - Update dependencies in time for 1.0 release
 - [HBASE-12363] - Improve how KEEP_DELETED_CELLS works with MIN_VERSIONS
 - [HBASE-12434] - Add a command to compact all the regions in a
regionserver
 - [HBASE-8707] - Add LongComparator for filter
 - [HBASE-12286] - [shell] Add server/cluster online load of configuration
changes
 - [HBASE-12361] - Show data locality of region in table page
 - [HBASE-12496] - A blockedRequestsCount metric
 - Switch to using new style of client APIs internally (in a lot of places)
 - Improvements in visibility labels
 - Perf improvements
 - Some more documentation improvements
 - Numerous improvements in other areas and bug fixes.

The release has these changes in default behaviour (from 0.99.1):
 - Disabled the "Distributed Log Replay" feature by default. Similar to
0.98
  and earlier releases "Distributed Log Split" is the default.


The list of changes in this release can be found in the release notes [3].
Thanks to everybody who contributed to this release!

ps. The release announcement was delayed by a couple of days due to some
INFRA issues.

Cheers,
The HBase Team

1. http://www.apache.org/dyn/closer.cgi/hbase/
2. https://hbase.apache.org/book/upgrading.html#hbase.versioning
3.
https://issues.apache.org/jira/secure/ReleaseNote.jspa?projectId=12310753&version=12328551
4.
https://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/hbase-dev/201409.mbox/%3CCAMUu0w94oARqcz2zY4ZLqy_AaqN70whhH1yCS_0BjPSEeEcM-w@mail.gmail.com%3E
5.
https://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/hbase-dev/201409.mbox/%3CCAMUu0w9Y_+Afw6wW0hA_P8KBEW35B3ncsHbUQAcfndzs8TcMyA@mail.gmail.com%3E