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antirez 3136 days ago. 278822 views.
It took more than expected, but finally we have it, Redis 3.2.0 stable is out with changes that may be useful to a big number of Redis users. At this point I covered the changes multiple time, but the big ones are:

* The GEO API. Index whatever you want by latitude and longitude, and query by radius, with the same speed and easy of use of the other Redis data structures. Here you can find the API documentation: http://redis.io/commands/#geo. Thank you to Matt Stancliff for the initial implementation, that was reworked but is still at the core of the GEO API, and to the developers of ARDB for providing the geo indexing code that Matt used.

* The new BITFIELD command allows to use a Redis string as a bit array composed of many integers with user specified size and offset. It supports increments and decrements to exploit this small (or large) integers as counters, with fine control over the overflow behavior. http://redis.io/commands/bitfield. Thanks to Yoav Steinberg for pushing forward this crazy idea and motivating me to write an implementation.

* Many improvements to Redis Cluster, including rebalancing capabilities in redis-trib and better replicas migration. However support for NATted envrionments and Docker port forwarding, while implemented in the “unstable” branch, was not backported to 3.2 for maturity concerns.

* Improvements to Lua scripts replication. It is now possible to use “effects replication” to write scripts containing side effects. It’s documented here:  http://redis.io/commands/EVAL.  Thanks to Yossi Gottlieb for stimulating the addition of this feature and helping in the design.

* We have now a serious Lua scripts debugger: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IMvRfStaoyM with support into redis-cli. Thanks to Itamar Haber, developer of non trivial scripts since the start of Lua scripting, that really wanted this feature and helped during the development.

* Redis is now more memory efficient thanks to changes operated by Oran Agra to SDS and the Jemalloc size classes setup. Also we have a new List internal representation contributed by Matt Stancliff which uses just a small percentage of the memory used before to represent large lists!

* Finally slaves and masters are in agreement about what keys are expired during read operations. It was about time :-)

* SPOP now accepts an optional count argument. Thanks to Alon Diamant for providing the initial implementation. I kinda rewrote it for performances later, and we ended with a pretty fast thing.

* RDB AUX fields. So now your RDB files have a few informations inside, like the server that generated it, in what date, and so forth. Soon we’ll have redis-cli able to parse those fields (in 3.2.1) hopefully. It’s a small amount of work but I’m remembering only know writing this notes, honestly.

* RDB loading is faster now.

* Sentinel can now scale monitoring many masters, but should be considered more an advanced beta than stable, so please test it in your environment carefully before deploying, a lot of code changed inside Sentinel internals.

* Many more things but this list is already long enough.

A big thank you to all the contributors that made this release possible, to the Redis user base which is lovely and encouraging, and to Redis Labs for sponsoring a lot of the work that went into 3.2.0.

During the previous weeks we also worked to a new interesting feature that will be released in the next versions of Redis, it will be announced during RedisConf 2016 in San Francisco, 10-11 May, so stay tuned!

One note about stability. I keep saying it all the time, but stability in software is not black and white. It’s like pink, yellow and green. No just kidding. It’s the usual shades of gray. So 3.2.0 looks solid, however it’s fresh meat. Start to use it incrementally and check how it works for you, and please report any issue promptly. However it’s also true that given that it stayed in RC for a lot of time, it was already tested by the brave users that were too much in need for the new features to deploy it ASAP.

The 3.2.0 full changelog is here: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/antirez/redis/3.2/00-RELEASENOTES

Redis 3.2.0 can be obtained as a tarball at http://download.redis.io, or by fetching the 3.2.0 tag from Github antirez/redis repository.

Enjoy!
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