Quick Update on Marten 7.0 (and Wolverine 2.0)

There’s a new Marten 7.0 beta 4 release out today with a new round of bug fixes and some performance enhancements. We’re getting closer to getting a 7.0 release out, so I thought I’d update the world a bit on what’s remaining. I’d also love to give folks a chance to weigh in on some of the outstanding work that may or may not make the cut for 7.0 or slide to later. Due to some commitments to clients, I’m hoping to have the release out by early February at the latest, but we’ll see.

A Wolverine 2.0 release will follow shortly, but that’s going to be almost completely about upgrading Wolverine to use the latest Marten and Weasel dependencies and shouldn’t result in any breaking changes.

What’s In Flight or Outstanding

There’s several medium sized efforts either in flight, or yet to come. User feedback is certainly welcome:

• Low level database execution improvements. We’re doing a lot of work to integrate relatively newer ADO.Net features from Npgsql that will help us wring out a little better performance. As part of that work, we’re going to replace our homegrown resiliency feature (IRetryPolicy) with a more efficient and likely more effective approach using Polly baked into Marten. I was hesitant to take on Polly before because of its tendency to be a diamond dependency issue, but I think we’ve changed our minds about the risk/reward equation here. I think we’ll also get a little performance and scalability boost by using Polly’s static Lambda approach in place of our current approach. The reality is that while you probably shouldn’t be too consumed with micro-optimizations in application development, it’s much more valuable in infrastructure code like Marten to be as performant as possible.
• Open Telemetry support baked in. I think this is a low hanging fruit issue that might be a great place for anyone to jump in. Please feel free to weigh in on the possible approaches we’ve outlined.
• Better scalability for asynchronous projections and the ability to deploy projection and event changes with less or even zero downtime compared to the current Marten. I’ll refer you to a longer discussion for feedback on possible directions. That discussion also touches on topics around event data migrations and archival strategies.
• Enabling built in support for strong typed identifiers. This is far more work than I personally think it’s worth, but plenty of folks tell us that it’s a must have feature even to the point where they tell us they won’t use Marten until this exists. This kind of thing is what drives me personally to make disparaging remarks about the DDD community’s seeming love of code ceremony. Grr.
• “Partial” document updates with native PostgreSQL features. We’ve had this functionality for years, but it depends on the PLv8 extension to PostgreSQL that’s continuously harder to use, especially on the cloud. I think this could be a big win, especially for users coming from MongoDb
• Dynamic Tenant Database Discovery — customer request, and that means it goes to a the top of the priority list. Weird how it works that way.
• What else folks? I don’t want the release to drag on forever, but there’s plenty of other things to do

LINQ Improvements

From my perspective, the effective rewrite of the LINQ provider support for V7 is the single biggest change and improvement for Marten 7. As always, I’m hopeful that this shores up Marten’s technical foundation for years to come. I’d sum that work up as:

• Glass Half Full: the new LINQ support covers a lot more scenarios that were missing previously, and especially improves both the number of supported use cases and the efficiency of the generated SQL for querying within child collections in many cases. Moreover, the new LINQ support should be better about telling you when it can’t support something instead of doing erroneous searches, and should be in much better shape for when we need to add new permutations to the support from user requests later.
• Glass Half Empty: It took a long, long time to get this done and it was quite an opportunity cost for me personally. We also got a large GitHub sponsorship for this work, and while I was and am very grateful for that, I’m also feeling guilty about how long it took to finish that work.

And that folks is the life of a semi-successful OSS author in one nutshell.

If you’re curious, here’s a write up on GitHub about the new LINQ internals that was meant for Marten contributors.