Announcing Dremio December 2020

Today we are excited to announce the release of Dremio December 2020!

This month’s release delivers very useful features like Apache Arrow Flight with Python, full support for CDP 7.1, security enhancements for Oracle connections, a new support bundle and much more. This blog post highlights the following updates:

• Arrow Flight clients
• Query support bundle
• Kerberos support for Dremio-Oracle connections
• User/job metrics available in the UI

Arrow Flight Libraries

Arrow Flight offers a dramatic performance improvement over ODBC and JDBC client connections by utilizing the Arrow format for data transfer internally. By avoiding expensive serialization and deserialization operations, Arrow Flight frequently offers 50-100x higher data transfer bandwidth over ODBC and JDBC connections which are popular industry standards for databases but not designed for transferring data lake scale datasets.

Arrow Flight builds on the Apache Arrow project, co-created by Dremio, which is now one of the most successful Apache Software Foundation projects with over 10 million downloads per month and has become an industry standard for efficient in-memory data representation and data exchange between systems. Arrow Flight introduces a new and modern standard for transporting data between networked applications

In this release, Dremio introduces Arrow Flight client libraries available in Java, Python and C++. These libraries will be available through the Apache Arrow project in the next release of Arrow. In the interim, these libraries are part of the Dremio December 2020 release and users can now take advantage of these libraries for evaluation and experimentation purposes.

One of the great advantages of this is that instead of every database or software vendor having their own drivers, the Arrow Flight libraries, database connectors, etc. will all come from the Arrow community, meaning that when users are developing their own applications there is only one set of libraries to use for any system that supports an Arrow Flight endpoint.

In this release, Dremio is also making Arrow Flight client examples available here which can be extremely useful in learning how to implement and use the available libraries.

Query Support Bundle

Another great feature that Dremio is releasing this month is a query support bundle. This feature offers a single place in the Dremio UI to download all associated (log and system) files for the Dremio engineering and/or support team to investigate any issues that may be taking place in the user’s environments. This eliminates the need to request access to SSH into environments and manually extract log files from multiple directories.

This bundle includes all different log files, system options, and a myriad of other information that engineering and support normally ask for when a customer faces an issue that requires technical support intervention. This feature is included in the UI and can be toggled “on” for users and/or administrators within the support menu in the admin console.

The query support bundle feature is available for Hadoop environments in the Dremio December 2020 release followed by other deployment options in future releases.

Support Oracle Connections Using Kerberos

Maintaining security as a top priority, Dremio December 2020 includes Kerberos support for Oracle data source connections. This feature is enabled by default on Oracle sources. To learn more about this new feature, check out the release notes.

User/Job Metrics

Furthering our efforts to enhance user experience, Dremio December 2020 includes the ability to observe user and job metrics in a newly added “Cluster Usage Data” section within the “About Dremio” screen. This provides users with up-to-date usage statistics such as unique users and jobs executed by day.

This is a great feature that enables admins to get a better understanding of how their Dremio deployment is being used in their organization.

Learn More

For a complete list of new features, enhancements, changes and fixes, please review the release notes. As always, we look forward to your feedback. Please post any questions or comments on our community site.