If you caught our last email newsletter, Data to the People #2 (subscribe on our website if you haven’t already), you likely caught some insight into our decentralized, peer-to-peer database layer’s latest update. Including some inspiring words that Source CTO John dropped live on our debut Community Call, we shared a quick look into v0.7.0’s ever-delightful take on the developer experience — with an extra focus on improving schema management and migration definition.

Now that we did it live, let’s dig a bit deeper into this update on our blog.

DefraDB: A Quick Refresher

If you need a refresher, DefraDB is our peer-to-peer, decentralized, NoSQL database layer. DefraDB helps fix many of the inefficient (and increasingly centralized) aspects of data creation, authorship, management, sharing, and utility that exist in web3 — and are often built on dated infrastructure.

DefraDB returns power and flexibility over data management — including providing privacy-centric access and co-management features to end users — back to developers, offering increased control over the data people need to build and deploy the future of truly decentralized applications. You can read more about DefraDB here and on our website.

Okay, now back to the update.

DefraDB: v0.7.0 — What’s New (and Improved)?

DefraDB’s latest update follows v0.6.0, which we explained in detail in a Q/A with the database’s lead dev, Fred Carle. While we urge you to check out that blog for more context on Defra’s latest version, we’ll share a quick piece of preliminary knowledge in that, as Fred said in the interview, “the goal for these pre-release updates is to reach a certain level of stability and features — to ensure that we’re building a solid foundation.” The same is true for V0.7.0 as it was with its predecessor.

DefraDB v0.7.0 is another major pre-production release ahead of the long-awaited 1.0. You can think about it like one of the Star Wars prequels (but way better).

The latest release, v0.7.0, has been focused on robustness, testing, and schema management (some of the delightful processes John dropped live on the call we mentioned above). Some additional highlighted new features include notable expansions to the expressiveness of schema migrations.

Check out the v0.7.0 Changelog

To get a full outline of the changes, we invite you to check out the official changelog below.

Note: this release includes a Breaking Change to the existing v0.5.x databases.

Features: Allow field indexing by name in PatchSchema (#1810)

Auto-create relation id fields via PatchSchema (#1807)

Support PatchSchema relational field kind substitution (#1777)

Add support for adding of relational fields (#1766)

Enable downgrading of documents via Lens inverses (#1721)

Fixes: Correctly handle serialisation of nil field values (#1872)

Compound filter operators with relations ([#1855])

Only update updated fields via update requests ([#1817)

Error when saving a deleted document (#1806)

Prevent multiple docs from being linked in one one (#1790)

Handle the querying of secondary relation id fields (#1768)

Improve the way migrations handle transactions (#1737)

Tooling: Add Akash deployment configuration (#1736)

Refactoring: HTTP client interface ([#1776])

Simplify fetcher interface (#1746)

Testing: Convert and move out of place explain tests ([#1878])

Update mutation tests to make use of mutation system (#1853)

Test top level agg. with compound relational filter (#1870)

Skip unsupported mutation types at test level (#1850)

Extend mutation tests with col.Update and Create (#1838)

Add tests for multiple one-one joins (#1793)

Join the Decentralized Future of Data Management

Well, that’s all for now on DefraDB’s latest update. If you need help migrating an existing deployment, reach out at hello@source.network or say hello (and ask a question) in Discord. Check out the full v0.7.0 changelog on GitHub.

Thanks for reading.

— Source Network