Chapter 8. Upgrading to Volt Active Data V13

New Prometheus metrics system — Volt V13 announces the general production release of a new metrics system, where every server in the cluster reports its own data through a Prometheus-compliant endpoint. You enable Prometheus metrics in the configuration file when initializing the database by adding the <metrics> element to the Volt configuration file:

<deployment>
 <cluster kfactor="1"/>
 <metrics enabled="true"/>
</deployment>

Once enabled, each Volt server reports server-specific information through the metrics port, which defaults to 11781. The new metrics system replaces the standalone Prometheus agent, which has now been deprecated. See the sections on integrating with Prometheus in the Volt Administrator's Guide and Volt Kubernetes Administrator's Guide.

New Grafana dashboards — To match the new metrics system, Volt provides sample Grafana dashboards to help visualize your database's performance and status. There are matching dashboards designed for use with Kubernetes and bare metal:

Support for alternate character sets — Volt provides full support for international characters through its use of UTF-8 for storing and displaying textual data. However, there are other character encodings that may be in use by customers, including both older, established encodings such as Shift_JIS and newer encodings like the Chinese GB18030-2022 standard. For customers using alternate character encodings as the default in their client environment, Volt now provides automatic conversion of character encodings both interactively and for file input. The sqlcmd utility automatically converts to and from the terminal session's localized character set for input and display. When reading and writing files, you can use the --charset qualifier to specify the character encoding of the file, both with the sqlcmd and csvloader utilities.

Improved command line interface for the sqlmd utility — In addition to full character set support, the sqlcmd utility has a more complete and consistent set of command line qualifiers. The new --output-file qualifier captures the output of SQL statements; it does not echo the commands or informational messages. When used with the --output-format=csv qualifier, --output-file now generates valid CSV files without extraneous lines. Similarly, the --file qualifier lets you process a file containing any valid sqlcmd statements or directives. And if the file contains only data definition language (DDL) statements, you can use the --batch qualifier to process all of the statement as a single batch significantly reducing the time required to update the schema. See the sqlcmd reference page for these and other improvements to the sqlcmd utility.

Beta support for ARM architecture — Beta software kits for running the VoltDB server software natively on ARM64 architecture are now available. If you are interested in participating in the ARM64 beta program, please contact your Volt Customer Success Manager.

Support for Kubernetes 1.27 — Volt Active Data now supports version 1.27 of the Kubernetes platform. See the Kubernetes Compatibility Chart for details on what versions of Kubernetes are supported by each version of VoltDB.