Regression Search And Destroy Contest Update

[Kathey Marsden <km...@sbcglobal.net>]

Hello Derby Users,

I wanted to send out an update on the Regression Search and Destroy 
contest  and make a most urgent appeal for user testing for 10.2.
The contest page is at: 
http://wiki.apache.org/db-derby/RegressionSearchAndDestroy
10.2 beta is available now at: 
http://people.apache.org/~rhillegas/10.2.1.0-beta/ .

First of all, I want to tell you that I have the chocolate ready to send 
out to the winners at the end of the contest    (71% Cocoa Organic Dark 
Chocolate from the Grenada Chocolate Company, yum yum!).  The 10.2 
branch has been cut, the target release date is still listed as 
September 19 (Yikes!) , and your chocolate is waiting, so there is 
absolutely no time to waste before you test 10.2.

- Download the Beta from 
http://people.apache.org/~rhillegas/10.2.1.0-beta/ .
- Record your application testing results on 
http://wiki.apache.org/db-derby/TenTwoApplicationTesting  (even if it is 
good news) or post to derby-user.
- List regressions identified by you and others and other work ease 
upgrade to 10.2 on the Wiki at:    
http://wiki.apache.org/db-derby/RegressionSearchAndDestroy

Secondly I want to report very mixed results on the success of the 
contest and user feedback for 10.2.

1)  Good news is we have found and fixed quite a few serious 
regressions.  See the contest page for some of them.
http://wiki.apache.org/db-derby/RegressionSearchAndDestroy

2)  Bad news is we have had very limited user feedback.  I can't recall 
seeing any posts on derby-user about 10.2 and no new entries on  
http://wiki.apache.org/db-derby/TenTwoApplicationTesting since my last 
update.  And I think  (may be wrong) that only one of our regressions 
actually came from a user, the rest were from development.

My feeling is that we need much, much, much more user testing and with 
current plans it needs to be concentrated into an extremely short time 
period, too short to feel confident about the release  IMHO. But through 
the miracle of open source scalability, if we light a spark and get this 
going, who knows...  If you have a performance sensitive or memory 
sensitive application, you simply *need*  to try 10.2.  There  have been 
great performance improvements, improvements in  network  lob streaming 
etc, but these types of changes entail a lot of code churn so  please, 
please, please run your tests  against 10.2. 

I'll be out for a while and will  probably  miss the 10.2 vote and the 
rest of the contest.  I hope the judges will  ping this list from time 
to time with updates and that users send the results of their testing 
and spread the word about  10.2 beta.  Also please take action or post 
your ideas on how to encourage 10.2 users testing and  perhaps get other 
projects using derby to test with 10.2. 

10.2 beta can be downloaded at: 
http://people.apache.org/~rhillegas/10.2.1.0-beta/. 


Thanks

Kathey


Note:   The unofficial nightly builds that I have pointed to before at 
http://www.multinet.no/~solberg/public/Apache/Derby/builds/  are for the 
trunk so will say 10.3, but have all of the latest greatest 10.2 
content.  I don't think there are builds set up yet for the 10.2 branch.