Marten 1.1 Release Notes

Marten 1.1 was released just now (as in, hold your horses until Nuget gets done indexing it) with an assortment of bug fixes, performance & reliability improvements, and a couple of new convenience methods. As our teams have used Marten more at work, we’ve also had to make some adjustments for running Marten under reduced Postgresql security privileges and with the “AutoCreateSchemaObjects == None” mode. Finally, we had to add a couple new public members to existing API’s, so SemVer rules mean this had to be a minor point bump.

So what’s new or different? You can find the entire 1.1 issue and pull request list in GitHub. The highlights are described below:

Distinct() Support in Linq

From a pull request by John Campion, Marten now supports the Linq Distinct() keyword:

public void use_distinct(IQuerySession session)
{
    var surnames = session
        .Query<User>()
        .Select(x => x.LastName)
        .Distinct();
}

Better Connection and Transaction Hygiene

I’m a little embarrassed by this one, but at least we got it before it did too much harm. Marten had been too aggressive in starting transactions in sessions which has had the effect of making Npgsql send extraneous ROLLBACK; messages to Postgresql to close out the empty transactions. In some failure cases, our team at work was seeing this cause a connection to hang. We made two fixes for this behavior:

First off, if you IDocumentSession.SaveChanges(Async) is called when there are no outstanding changes queued up, Marten does absolutely nothing. No connection opened, no transaction started, just nothing.

Secondly, Marten now starts transactions lazily within an IDocumentSession. So instead of starting a transaction on the first time a session opens a connection to Postgresql, it defers that until SaveChanges() or SaveChangesAsync() is called.

public void lazy_tx(IDocumentSession session)
{
    // Executing this query will *not* start
    // a new transaction
    var users = session
        .Query<User>()
        .Where(x => x.Internal)
        .ToList();

    session.Store(new User {UserName = "lebron"});

    // This starts a transaction against the open
    // connection before doing any writes
    session.SaveChanges();
}

Data Migration Improvements

From our work on moving document storage from RavenDb to Marten (and other users too), we’ve bumped into a little bit of friction in Marten. The bulk inserts in either of the non-default modes left out the last modified data. That impacts either of these options:

public void bulk_inserts(IDocumentStore store, Target[] documents)
{
    store.BulkInsert(documents, BulkInsertMode.IgnoreDuplicates);

    // or

    store.BulkInsert(documents, BulkInsertMode.OverwriteExisting);
}

To make it easier to migrate data in documents that uses a Hilo sequence for identity assignment, we added a convenience method to establish a new “floor” in the sequence to avoid conflicting with the existing data being brought over from a new system.

public void reset_hilo(IDocumentStore store)
{
    // This resets the Hilo state in the database
    // for the IntDoc document type so that
    // all id's assigned will be greater than the floor
    // value.
    store.Advanced.ResetHiloSequenceFloor<IntDoc>(3000);
}

Do note that it’s possible and even likely that there will be gaps in the id sequence in the database when you do this.