Marten v0.9 is Out!

The Marten community made a big, big release today that marks a big milestone for Marten’s viability as a usable product. I just uploaded v0.9 to Nuget, and published all the outstanding documentation updates to our project website.

A lot of folks contributed to this release, and I’ll inevitably miss several names, so I’m just going to issue a huge thank you to everyone who put in pull requests or provided valuable feedback in our Gitter room or helped with the documentation updates. Marten is well on its way to being the most positive OSS experience I’ve ever had.

While you can see the full list of changes, fixes, and improvements in the GitHub milestone (81 issues!), the big highlights are:

1. The Event Store feature is finally ready for very early adopters with some basic projection support. I discussed the vision for this functionality in a blog post yesterday. The very early feedback suggests that the existing API is in for some changes, but I’d still like to get more folks to look at what we have.
2. Compiled Queries to avoid re-parsing Linq queries
3. The Include() feature for more efficient data fetching
4. Select() transformations inside of the Linq support
5. Improved new ways to fetch the raw JSON for documents with the new AsJson() method.
6. The ability to configure which schema Marten will use for document storage or the event store as part of the DocumentStore options. That was a frequent user request, and thanks to Tim Cools, we’ve got that now.
7. Ability to express foreign key relationships between document types. Hey, Postgresql is a relational database, so why not take advantage of that when it’s valuable?
8. More efficient asynchronous querying internals
9. Linq support for aggregate functions like Average(), Min(), Max(), and Sum()

Next Steps

Other than the event store functionality that’s just getting off the ground, I think the pace of Marten development is about to slow down and be more about refinements than adding lots of new functionality. I’m hoping to switch to dribbling out incremental releases every couple weeks until we’re ready to declare 1.0.