Releases

Flowman releases are done on an irregular basis, whenever new features are available or important issues have been fixed.

Official Releases

You will find all official Flowman releases on GitHub.

Past Releases

The following gives an (incomplete) list of past releases of the last 12 months. This will help you to spot breaking changes over time.

Version 0.28.0

  • Improve support for MariaDB / MySQL as data sinks
  • github-245: Bump ejs, @vue/cli-plugin-babel, @vue/cli-plugin-eslint and @vue/cli-service in /flowman-studio-ui
  • github-246: Bump ejs, @vue/cli-plugin-babel, @vue/cli-plugin-eslint and @vue/cli-service in /flowman-server-ui
  • github-247: Automatically generate YAML schemas as part of build process
  • github-248: Bump scss-tokenizer and node-sass in /flowman-server-u
  • github-249: Add new options -X and -XX to increase logging
  • github-251: Support for log4j2 Configuration
  • github-252: Move sftp target into separate plugin
  • github-253: SQL Server relation should support explicit staging table
  • github-254: Use DATETIME2 for timestamps in MS SQL Server
  • github-256: Provide Maven archetype for simple Flowman projects

Version 0.27.0 - 2022-09-09

  • github-232: [BUG] Column descriptions should be propagates in UNIONs
  • github-233: [BUG] Missing Hadoop dependencies for S3, Delta, etc
  • github-235: Implement new rest hook with fine control
  • github-229: A build target should not fail if Impala “COMPUTE STATS” fails
  • github-236: ‘copy’ target should not apply output schema
  • github-237: jdbcQuery relation should use fields “sql” and “file” instead of “query”
  • github-239: Allow optional SQL statement for creating jdbcTable
  • github-238: Implement new ‘jdbcCommand’ target
  • github-240: [BUG] Data quality checks in documentation should not fail on NULL values
  • github-241: Throw an error on duplicate entity definitions
  • github-220: Upgrade Delta-Lake to 2.0 / 2.1
  • github-242: Switch to Spark 3.3 as default
  • github-243: Use alternative Spark MS SQL Connector for Spark 3.3
  • github-244: Generate project HTML documentation with optional external CSS file

Version 0.26.1 - 2022-08-03

  • github-226: Upgrade to Spark 3.2.2
  • github-227: [BUG] Flowman should not fail with field names containing “-”, “/” etc
  • github-228: Padding and truncation of CHAR(n)/VARCHAR(n) should be configurable

Version 0.26.0 - 2022-07-27

  • github-202: Add support for Spark 3.3
  • github-203: [BUG] Resource dependencies for Hive should be case-insensitive
  • github-204: [BUG] Detect indirect dependencies in a chain of Hive views
  • github-207: [BUG] Build should not directly fail if inferring dirty status fails
  • github-209: [BUG] HiveViews should not trigger cascaded refresh during CREATE phase even when nothing is changed
  • github-211: Implement new hiveQuery relation
  • github-210: [BUG] HiveTables should be migrated if partition columns change
  • github-208: Implement JDBC hook for database based semaphores
  • github-212: [BUG] Hive views should not be migrated in RELAXED mode if only comments have changed
  • github-214: Update ImpalaJDBC driver to 2.6.26.1031
  • github-144: Support changing primary key for JDBC relations
  • github-216: [BUG] Floats should be represented as FLOAT and not REAL in MySQL/MariaDB
  • github-217: Support collations for creating/migrating JDBC tables
  • github-218: [BUG] Postgres dialect should be used for Postgres JDBC URLs
  • github-219: [BUG] SchemaMapping should retain incoming comments
  • github-215: Support COLUMN STORE INDEX for MS SQL Server
  • github-182: Support column descriptions in JDBC relations (SQL Server / Azure SQL)
  • github-224: Support column descriptions for MariaDB / MySQL databases
  • github-223: Support column descriptions for Postgres database
  • github-205: Initial support Oracle DB via JDBC
  • github-225: [BUG] Staging schema should not have comments

Breaking changes

We take backward compatibility very seriously. But sometimes a breaking change is needed to clean up code and to enable new features. This release contains some breaking changes, which are annoying but simple to fix. In order to respect null as keyword in YAML with a special semantics, some entities needed to be renamed, as described in the following table:

category old kind new kind
mapping null empty
relation null empty
target null empty
store null none
history null none

Version 0.25.1 - 2022-06-15

  • github-195: [BUG] Metric “target_records” is not reset correctly after an execution phase is finished
  • github-197: [BUG] Impala REFRESH METADATA should not fail when dropping views

Version 0.25.0 - 2022-05-31

  • github-184: Only read in *.yml / *.yaml files in module loader
  • github-183: Support storing SQL in external file in hiveView
  • github-185: Missing _SUCCESS file when writing to dynamic partitions
  • github-186: Support output mode OVERWRITE_DYNAMIC for Delta relation
  • github-149: Support creating views in JDBC with new jdbcView relation
  • github-190: Replace logo in documentation
  • github-188: Log detailed timing information when writing to JDBC relation
  • github-191: Add user provided description to quality checks
  • github-192: Provide example queries for JDBC metric sink

Version 0.24.1 - 2022-04-28

  • github-175: ‘–jobs’ parameter starts way to many parallel jobs
  • github-176: start-/end-date in report should not be the same
  • github-177: Implement generic SQL schema check
  • github-179: Update DeltaLake dependency to 1.2.1

Version 0.24.0 - 2022-04-05

  • github-168: Support optional filters in data quality checks
  • github-169: Support sub-queries in filter conditions
  • github-171: Parallelize loading of project files
  • github-172: Update CDP7 profile to the latest patch level
  • github-153: Use non-privileged user in Docker image
  • github-174: Provide application for generating YAML schema

Breaking changes

We take backward compatibility very seriously. But sometimes a breaking change is needed to clean up code and to enable new features. This release contains some breaking changes, which are annoying but simple to fix. In order to avoid YAML schema inconsistencies, some entities needed to be renamed, as described in the following table:

category old kind new kind
mapping const values
mapping empty null
mapping read relation
mapping readRelation relation
mapping readStream stream
relation const values
relation empty null
relation jdbc jdbcTable, jdbcQuery
relation table hiveTable
relation view hiveView
schema embedded inline

Version 0.23.1 - 2022-03-28

  • github-154: Fix failing migration when PK requires change due to data type
  • github-156: Recreate indexes when data type of column changes
  • github-155: Project level configs are used outside job
  • github-157: Fix UPSERT operations for SQL Server
  • github-158: Improve non-nullability of primary key column
  • github-160: Use sensible defaults for default documenter
  • github-161: Improve schema caching during execution
  • github-162: ExpressionColumnCheck does not work when results contain NULL values
  • github-163: Implement new column length quality check

Version 0.23.0 - 2022-03-18

  • github-148: Support staging table for all JDBC relations
  • github-120: Use staging tables for UPSERT and MERGE operations in JDBC relations
  • github-147: Add support for PostgreSQL
  • github-151: Implement column level lineage in documentation
  • github-121: Correctly apply documentation, before/after and other common attributes to templates
  • github-152: Implement new ‘cast’ mapping

Version 0.22.0 - 2022-03-01

  • Add new sqlserver relation
  • Implement new documentation subsystem
  • Change default build to Spark 3.2.1 and Hadoop 3.3.1
  • Add new drop target for removing tables
  • Speed up project loading by reusing Jackson mapper
  • Implement new jdbc metric sink
  • Implement schema cache in Executor to speed up documentation and similar tasks
  • Add new config variables flowman.execution.mapping.schemaCache and flowman.execution.relation.schemaCache
  • Add new config variable flowman.default.target.verifyPolicy to ignore empty tables during VERIFY phase
  • Implement initial support for indexes in JDBC relations

Version 0.21.1 - 2022-01-28

  • flowexec now returns different exit codes depending on the processing result

Version 0.21.0 - 2022-01-26

  • Fix wrong dependencies in Swagger plugin
  • Implement basic schema inference for local CSV files
  • Implement new stack mapping
  • Improve error messages of local CSV parser

Version 0.20.1 - 2022-01-06

  • Implement detection of dependencies introduced by schema

Version 0.20.0 - 2022-01-05

  • Fix detection of Derby metastore to truncate comment lengths.
  • Add new config variable flowman.default.relation.input.columnMismatchPolicy (default is IGNORE)
  • Add new config variable flowman.default.relation.input.typeMismatchPolicy (default is IGNORE)
  • Add new config variable flowman.default.relation.output.columnMismatchPolicy (default is ADD_REMOVE_COLUMNS)
  • Add new config variable flowman.default.relation.output.typeMismatchPolicy (default is CAST_ALWAYS)
  • Improve handling of _SUCCESS files for detecting (non-)dirty directories
  • Implement new merge target
  • Implement merge operation for Delta relations
  • Implement merge operation for JDBC relations (only for some databases, i.e. MS SQL)
  • Add new config variable flowman.execution.target.useHistory (default is false)
  • Change the semantics of config variable flowman.execution.target.forceDirty (default is false)
  • Add new -d / --dirty option for explicitly marking individual targets as dirty

Version 0.19.0 - 2021-12-13

  • Add build profile for Hadoop 3.3
  • Add build profile for Spark 3.2
  • Allow SQL expressions as dimensions in aggregate mapping
  • Update Hive views when the resulting schema would change
  • Add new mapping cache command to FlowShell
  • Support embedded connection definitions
  • Much improved Flowman History Server
  • Fix wrong metric names with TemplateTarget
  • Implement more template types for connection, schema, dataset, assertion and measure
  • Implement new measure target for creating custom metrics for measuring data quality
  • Add new config option flowman.execution.mapping.parallelism

Version 0.18.0 - 2021-10-13

  • Improve automatic schema migration for Hive and JDBC relations
  • Improve support of CHAR(n) and VARCHAR(n) types. Those types will now be propagated to Hive with newer Spark versions
  • Support writing to dynamic partitions for file relations, Hive tables, JDBC relations and Delta tables
  • Fix the name of some config variables (floman.* => flowman.*)
  • Added new config variables flowman.default.relation.migrationPolicy and flowman.default.relation.migrationStrategy
  • Add plugin for supporting DeltaLake (https://delta.io), which provides deltaTable and deltaFile relation types
  • Fix non-deterministic column order in schema mapping, values mapping and values relation
  • Mark Hive dependencies has ‘provided’, which reduces the size of dist packages
  • Significantly reduce size of AWS dependencies in AWS plugin
  • Add new build profile for Cloudera CDP-7.1
  • Improve Spark configuration of LocalSparkSession and TestRunner
  • Update Spark 3.0 build profile to Spark 3.0.3
  • Upgrade Impala JDBC driver from 2.6.17.1020 to 2.6.23.1028
  • Upgrade MySQL JDBC driver from 8.0.20 to 8.0.25
  • Upgrade MariaDB JDBC driver from 2.2.4 to 2.7.3
  • Upgrade several Maven plugins to latest versions
  • Add new config option flowman.workaround.analyze_partition to workaround CDP 7.1 issues
  • Fix migrating Hive views to tables and vice-versa
  • Add new option “-j ” to allow running multiple job instances in parallel
  • Add new option “-j ” to allow running multiple tests in parallel
  • Add new uniqueKey assertion
  • Add new schema assertion
  • Update Swagger libraries for swagger schema
  • Implement new openapi plugin to support OpenAPI 3.0 schemas
  • Add new readHive mapping
  • Add new simpleReport and report hook
  • Implement new templates

Version 0.17.0 - 2021-06-02

  • New Flowman Kernel and Flowman Studio application prototypes
  • New ParallelExecutor
  • Fix before/after dependencies in count target
  • Default build is now Spark 3.1 + Hadoop 3.2
  • Remove build profiles for Spark 2.3 and CDH 5.15
  • Add MS SQL Server plugin containing JDBC driver
  • Speed up file listing for file relations
  • Use Spark JobGroups
  • Better support running Flowman on Windows with appropriate batch scripts