by Rayees Pasha, Product Manager, TigerGraph

On December 2nd 2020, we announced the general availability release of TigerGraph version 3.1. In this blog, we would like to provide more details on the release. TigerGraph 3.1 is the first feature update in the 3.x series following the major 3.0 release earlier this year. As we round out 2020, we are pleased to offer some exciting new features as part of the 3.1. Additionally, we have added some features that build on and extend our core capabilities that have helped us become the only Graph database designed for enterprises. With 3.1, our goal is to make TigerGraph ready for the most demanding workloads and enterprise customer requirements. 

Areas of Product Focus

In 3.1, we have primarily focused on Availability, Security and Operational Excellence as three pillars of feature development.

• Availability: Enable customers to run Business critical workloads by enhancing fault tolerance in all areas of the product.
• Security: Allow enterprise with large number of users and diverse set of use cases to use a unified system with data access safeguards.
• Operational Excellence: Make it easier for Operations staff to support TigerGraph database through multiple interfaces 

TigerGraph 3.1 Feature Highlights

New features and enhancements in 3.1 touch all areas of the product. A quick tour of the new feature highlights in version 3.1. 

Availability:

In 3.1, we are introducing Continuous Availability as a key differentiation to ensure that TigerGraph can be run under demanding conditions and tolerate both software and hardware failures at multiple levels. We have designed Continuous Availability to go beyond the basic requirements of any system that has HA capabilities. This capability allows business continuity besides enhancing uptime of services. Specifically, we have added the following features to help attain this goal:

• Enhanced availability for user-facing components including GSQL and GraphStudio to ensure always-on client connectivity
  • Support continuous availability with application server HA
• Disaster Recovery Support using native Cross-region replication for core data operations
  • Allow customers to deploy TigerGraph clusters across Regions and Data Centers 

Security

As more of our customers start using TigerGraph in multiple applications, the need for shared access based on granular controls has become critical. TigerGraph is built as a physically converged but logically separate database system. In order to enable seamless collaboration between different teams, strong safeguards for data access are required to be in place to ensure the right permissions are enforced. Additionally, there should be visibility into authorization enforcement to audit the access records. With all that in mind, the following features were added to 3.1:

• Vertex-level Access Control 
  • Similar to Row-level access: tags on individual vertices determine which users/roles have access to the data sets
  • This is a BETA feature in 3.1. We plan to enhance this feature by adding more functionality in the upcoming releases.
• Audit Logging Enhancements
  • User and system application information for all data access requests.
  • Time of the Request Request Parameters, Status (request succeeded or failed) for all requests 
  • System management and configuration changes

Operational Excellence

In 3.0, Ease of Use and Developer Productivity were major areas of focus. We extend that to Operations teams in 3.1 with features designed at making it easier for DBAs to diagnose problems. Also, we are bringing parity to the AdminPortal by making more and more administrative tasks available through the GUI. Here are a few features in this area:

• Granular Query level monitoring
  • Granular Memory usage reporting for queries
• AdminPortal:
  • Support continuous availability in Admin Portal with application server HA
  • Allow customers to debug and manage database logs
  • Security setup and configuration for LDAP/SSO/SSL
  • Perform cluster configuration changes in restpp, Nginx, application server setting

Additionally, there are a number of new features on the Database Engine and Language side as part of ongoing improvements to make the product easier to use for the developers. 

• Support for SQL-like tabular SELECT and Output
  • Easier application and developer migration from relational database
  • Allow easy integration with 3rd party BI tools
• Read-Committed Isolation level for Querying
  • Flexibility for developers to pick Isolation level based on application needs and reduce concurrent resource contention
• More powerful Distributed Mode queries
  • Queries run in Distributed mode support nearly the full scope of the GSQL language.

And many more … 

If you would like to get started with TigerGraph 3.1, you can download TigerGraph 3.1 binary packages at TigerGraph Download Location.

If you have any questions or feedback regarding TigerGraph version 3.1 release, please feel free to reach out to TigerGraph Product team at [email protected]

Thank you

TigerGraph Database Product Team