New Marten Release and What’s Next?

I uploaded a new Nuget for Marten v0.9.2 yesterday with a couple new features and about two weeks worth of bug fixes and some refinements. You can find the full list of issues and pull requests in this release from the v0.9.1 and v0.9.2 milestones in GitHub.

The highlight of this release in terms of raw usability is probably some overdue improvements to Marten’s underlying schema management:

1. Marten can detect when the configured upsert functions are missing or do not match the configuration and rebuild them
2. Marten can detect missing or changed indexes and make the appropriate updates.

Some other things that are new:

• There’s now a synchronous batch querying option
• You can now use the AsJson() Linq operator in combination with Select() transforms (this is going to get its own blog post soon-ish).
• The default transaction isolation level is ReadCommitted
• It won’t provide much value until there’s more there, but I’ve added some rolling buffer queueing support for being able to do asynchronous projections in the event store. There’ll be a blog post about that one soon just to see if I can trick some of you into being technical reviewers or contributors on that one;)

The two big features are discussed below:

Paging Support

We flat out copied part of RavenDb’s paging support for more efficient paging support. Take the example of showing a large data set in a user interface and wanting to do that one page at a time. You need to know how many total documents match the query criteria to be able to present an accurate paging bar. Fortunately, you can get that total number now without making a second round trip to the database with this syntax:

// We're going to use stats as an output
// parameter to the call below, so we
// have to declare the "stats" object
// first
QueryStatistics stats = null;

var list = theSession
    .Query<Target>()
    .Stats(out stats)
    .Where(x => x.Number > 10).Take(5)
    .ToList();

list.Any().ShouldBeTrue();

// Now, the total results data should
// be available
stats.TotalResults.ShouldBe(count);

In combination with the existing support for the Take() and Skip() Linq operators, you should have everything you need for efficient paging with Marten.

Include() inside of Compiled Queries

The Include() feature is now usable from within the compiled query feature, so finally, two of our best features for optimizing data access can work together. Below is a sample:

public class IssueByTitleIncludingUsers : ICompiledQuery<Issue>
{
    public string Title { get; set; }
    public User IncludedAssignee { get; private set; } = new User();
    public User IncludedReported { get; private set; } = new User();
    public JoinType JoinType { get; set; } = JoinType.Inner;

    public Expression<Func<IQueryable<Issue>, Issue>> QueryIs()
    {
        return query => query
            .Include<Issue, IssueByTitleIncludingUsers>(x => x.AssigneeId, x => x.IncludedAssignee, JoinType)
            .Include<Issue, IssueByTitleIncludingUsers>(x => x.ReporterId, x => x.IncludedReported, JoinType)
            .Single(x => x.Title == Title);
    }
}

 

What’s Next?

Besides whatever bug fixes come up, I think the next things I’m working on for the document database support are soft deletes, bulk insert improvements, and finally getting a versioned document story going. On the event store side of things, it’s all about projections. We’ll have a working asynchronous projection feature in the next release, maybe support for arbitrary categorization inside of aggregated projections, and some preliminary support for Javascript projections.

Got other requests, needs, or problems with Marten? Tell us all about it anytime in the Gitter room.