New features in 5.9

Operations Dashboard Improvements

We introduced Operations Dashboard in CloverDX 5.8. In this release we’re improving usability and flexibility of the dashboard. The largest change is the introduction of multiple dashboards. You can now create different views of your environment to suit different teams or users.

We’ve also implemented “past alerts” functionality that will guarantee that your team will never miss any alert. Monitors will now remember that an alert has been raised and will show you a badge that will help you see which monitors had failures in the past even though they may be running properly again. 

CloverDX Incubation

As we always strive to bring you the latest and greatest features in our products, we are introducing a new way that will allow us to deliver features to you earlier that usually – CloverDX Incubation. 

With Incubation, we are aiming at providing production-quality code (i.e., fully tested) which you can play with and provide feedback to us about its usability and your use cases. While the code delivered in Incubation is fully tested, we do not recommend using these features in production since we expect to make larger (possibly not backwards compatible) changes based on the feedback we receive from you.

Once the API or interface of Incubation feature is stable (which usually will be the next release), we will move the feature out of Incubation, and it will then live in its proper place. We’ll then maintain backwards compatibility just like we do for any other part of CloverDX.

Kafka Connections and Components

We are releasing native support for Kafka as part of our Incubation pack in CloverDX 5.9. With new Kafka connections you can easily connect directly to your Kafka cluster. You can connect to Kafka clusters with SSL/TLS, Kerberos or Plain authentication.

When working with Kafka, you can use three new components: 

• KafkaReader: allows you to consume messages from Kafka topics. We support string as well as binary data and you can configure many different options (including auto-commit, inactivity periods and much more). 

• KafkaWriter: allows you to write messages to Kafka topic. You can work with text as well as binary data and just as with KafkaReader, we support full range of options to help you determine how to write your data. 

• KafkaCommit: allows you to manage your offsets within topic partitions manually to make sure you only move the offset once your data has been safely consumed and processed.

Since these components are all part of Incubation, we’d like to ask you for feedback – how you imagine you can use the components, whether they fit into your use cases and of course any usability issues.

Microsoft SQL Server 2019 Support

CloverDX Server now supports SQL Server 2019 as its backend database. We still support SQL Server 2014 so you do not need to migrate although we recommend you update the driver to the latest one (8.4 at the time of writing).

Other Highlights

Besides the above, we’ve made many more changes in CloverDX. Following is a selection of the more interesting changes: 

• Performance improvement when listing files in sandboxes – the files are now streamed as they are read instead of waiting for all files to be discovered. 

• CloverDX Designer installer now ships with AdoptOpenJDK 11 instead of Oracle JDK 8. Oracle JDK 8 is still supported if you need it. 

Feature Removal Notice

CloverDX 5.9 is the last release that will support the following: 

• Launch Services. Launch Services have been replaced by Data Services and have been deprecated since CloverETL 4.9 (released in July 2018). Launch Services users will be required to migrate their code to use Data Services instead. More details in CLO-20307. 

• RSE projects. RSE is a framework that was used to synchronize Designer and Server projects up until CloverETL 4.2 (June 2016) where we implemented more powerful “sync projects”. Users will be required to re-link their projects as “sync projects”. More details in CLO-20308. 

• Deprecated components XLSDataReader and XLSDataWriter. Both components are deprecated and have better replacement (SpreadsheetDataReader and SpreadsheetDataWriter). More details in CLO-20309.