What’s New in Exasol 8?

This article describes some of the main features and differences that are introduced with Exasol 8.

Exasol 8 is based on a new architecture that provides many advantages and more flexibility to deploy Exasol on the platform of your choice. The new architecture also significantly changes the procedures for installation, deployment, and update of Exasol. This version of Exasol also brings a number of new features and improvements, while some features that existed in previous versions may have been altered or deprecated.

For more details of the changes introduced with each release, see the Release Notes.

Deployment options

Exasol 8 can be deployed as a cloud application on AWS, or as a Linux application installed on hardware or on a cloud service. For more information about the different deployment options, see Exasol on AWS and Exasol On-Prem.

Exasol Deployment Tool (c4)

Exasol Deployment Tool (c4) is a new command line tool that is used for deploying Exasol 8 on all supported platforms. For more information about how to use c4, see Exasol Deployment Tool (c4) (AWS) and Exasol Deployment Tool (c4) (on-premises).

Software and OS decoupling

The on-premises edition of Exasol 7.1 and earlier versions is provided as a complete system, consisting of an Exasol database pre-installed on a custom CentOS-based operating system. Exasol 8 is instead provided as a software package that you install on a cloud service or on your own hardware, using a Linux distribution of your choice.

For more details about the supported Linux distributions and other system requirements when installing Exasol 8 as an application, see System Requirements.

Object storage

For cloud deployments of Exasol 8 on AWS, database persistent storage is moved from local disks to object storage such as Amazon S3. This lowers the overall cost of the deployment, since object storage is cheaper than the equivalent attached persistent disks.

For more information, see Storage Management.

storage compute decoupling

Multiple clusters

A cloud deployment of Exasol 8 on AWS can have multiple compute clusters that operate on the same data. This provides greater flexibility for organizations to split and isolate workloads on demand.

For more information about clusters and databases in AWS deployments, see Cluster Management and Database Management.

Administration

Exasol 8 systems does not have the EXAOperation user interface, and there is no license server. Exasol 8 instead provides several administration interfaces that enable you to deploy and manage your databases and clusters using both built-in and external tools. The administration interfaces are available on all database nodes.

For more information, see Administration Tools (AWS) and Administration Tools (on-premises).

Access node

In AWS cloud deployments, the inclusion of a separate access node in the main cluster allows you to carry out administrative tasks that require shutting down all the database nodes, such as when you want to vertically scale the main cluster (change instance types).

clusters with access node

Scalability

Scalability is the ability to increase and decrease resources based on the business demands. The new architecture in Exasol 8 makes both vertical scaling (changing cluster resources) and horizontal scaling (changing the number of clusters) much easier than in previous versions.

Vertical scaling refers to changing the compute power and RAM to optimize concurrency. When you scale up or down, the amount of VCPUs and RAM allocated to the cluster is adjusted based on the new cluster size. You can use vertical scaling when you want to:

  • Speed up the queries you are executing.
  • Run large complex queries or support bigger data sets without impacting the performance.
  • Add more users or concurrency without affecting the performance.

Compared to previous versions, vertical scaling is now more convenient because changing instance types only requires shutting down a single worker cluster, not the entire database.

Horizontal scaling entails adding more clusters to optimize concurrency and manage higher workloads. You can use horizontal scaling when you want to isolate different workloads between teams and ensure that resources used in queries by one team do not impact other teams.

Multiple cluster operation is only supported in native cloud deployments on AWS.

How to migrate to Exasol 8

Because of the different architecture in Exasol 8, it is not possible to update directly from Exasol 7.1 to Exasol 8. To move your database to Exasol 8 you must first create an Exasol 8 deployment with the same number of nodes as the Exasol 7.1 database, create a backup of the Exasol 7.1 database, and then restore the backup into the new deployment.

For more information, see Migrate from Exasol 7.1 to Exasol 8 (AWS) and Migrate from Exasol 7.1 to Exasol 8 (on-premises).