New Features in Release 26.1

System Compatibility Version (SCV) Upgrade and Row Metadata Enhancements

This release enhances upgrade safety and feature enablement through the System Compatibility Version (SCV) mechanism. New releases can introduce incompatible changes; SCV provides an explicit, post-upgrade step to ensure the store reaches a consistent compatibility state and to prevent partially-upgraded environments from inadvertently using features that are not yet enabled.

After upgrading all storage nodes and related components (SDK/direct drivers, multi-region agents, etc.), administrators must run plan upgrade-scv -version from the Admin CLI to enable features up to the specified version. Until the SCV upgrade completes, attempts to use newly introduced capabilities may fail with “incompatible client/service” or “feature requires version enabled” errors. The verify configuration, verify upgrade, and verify prerequisite commands will emit advisory notes when SCV has not been upgraded.

See the documentation for more details

Predicate Filtering on Streams

Streams API now extends server-side filtering beyond table subscriptions by supporting application-supplied predicates. The kvstore Feeder continues to block writes to non-subscribed tables, and for subscribed tables it now streams only the writes that match the provided predicates. This significantly reduces network traffic and downstream processing, and simplifies applications by removing the need for complex client-side filtering logic.

Last Write Metadata (GA in 26.1)

Last Write Metadata is now officially released (GA) in 26.1.

This feature allows applications to attach user-supplied metadata to write operations, provided as a JSON object, and persist that information alongside the record. Records can later be filtered using the system-defined function last_write_metadata(). If you previously used the experimental "User-supplied record metadata" capability, note that it has been renamed to "Last Write Metadata".

Creation Time Metadata

This feature allows application to obtain the original insertion timestamp (UTC, ms precision) of a row, complementing the existing modification time, which returns the latest update time (or insertion time if never modified). Added creation_time() query row function returning the creation time. Note that rows inserted prior to enabling the system compatibility version to 26.1 will have ill-defined creation times. To ensure the values of creation times are accurate, please only obtain creation times from rows that are inserted after the system compatibility version is enabled to 26.1.

KVInsight Monitoring Framework (Experimental)

Added an experimental version of KVInsight, a tool-agnostic monitoring framework for Oracle NoSQL Database. KVInsight provides a unified monitoring infrastructure to simplify how performance metrics are collected, aggregated, and exported, enabling integration with a variety of monitoring solutions.

Today, Oracle NoSQL Database exposes performance monitoring through multiple mechanisms (for example, JMX MBeans, MonitorAgent StatsPacket, and the Collector Service) that differ in datasets, formats, and storage locations (CSV, JSON, JMX messages). This fragmentation makes it difficult for administrators to set up monitoring dashboards and pipelines, and it can limit flexibility in choosing monitoring backends. It can also make it harder for operations teams to interpret metrics consistently and take timely, actionable steps to keep clusters healthy.

KVInsight addresses these challenges by offering a consistent configuration and export model for monitoring data. In this release, KVInsight supports exporting metrics via CSV and Prometheus.

Before using this experimental feature, review the documentation for current limitations and deployment considerations. We appreciate your feedback on the usefulness of KVInsight and encourage you to post feedback in the Oracle NoSQL Database GitHub repository.

Support for UNION ALL (Experimental)

Added support for the UNION ALL operator to combine results from multiple SELECT statements into a single result set without de-duplication, preserving all rows returned by each query.

Support for SUBQUERY (Experimental)

Added support for SUBQUERY expressions, enabling nested SELECT statements within a query (e.g., in WHERE, FROM, or SELECT clauses) to support more complex filtering and data shaping patterns.

Deprecation Notice: Coherence Package

Release 26.1 is the last release to ship with the Coherence package. The Coherence package is deprecated and is no longer certified with Oracle NoSQL Database.

Deprecation Notice: External Table Package

Deprecation Notice: External Table Package Release 26.1 is the last release to ship with the External Table package. The External Table (exttab) package is deprecated and is no longer certified with Oracle NoSQL Database.

Deprecation Notice: Hadoop

Release 26.1 is the last release to ship with the Hadoop package. The Hadoop package is deprecated and is no longer certified with Oracle NoSQL Database.