The Apache Kudu team is happy to announce the release of Kudu 1.6.0!

Apache Kudu 1.6.0 is a minor release that offers new features, performance optimizations, incremental improvements, and bug fixes.

Release highlights:

Kudu servers can now tolerate short interruptions in NTP clock synchronization. NTP synchronization is still required when any Kudu daemon starts up. Tablet servers will no longer crash when a disk containing data blocks fails, unless that disk also stores WAL segments or tablet metadata. Instead of crashing, the tablet server will shut down any tablets that may have lost data locally and Kudu will re-replicate the affected tablets to another tablet server. More information can be found in the documentation under Recovering from Disk Failure. Tablet server startup time has been improved significantly on servers containing large numbers of blocks. The Spark DataSource integration now can take advantage of scan locality for better scan performance. The scan will take place at the closest replica instead of going to the leader. Support for Spark 1 has been removed in Kudu 1.6.0 and now only Spark 2 is supported. Spark 1 support was deprecated in Kudu 1.5.0. HybridTime timestamp propagation now works in the Java client when using scan tokens. Tablet servers now consider the health of all replicas of a tablet before deciding to evict one. This can improve the stability of the Kudu cluster when multiple servers temporarily go down at the same time. A bug in the C++ client was fixed that could cause tablets to be erroneously pruned, or skipped, during certain scans, resulting in fewer results than expected being returned from queries. The bug only affected tables whose range partition columns are a proper prefix of the primary key. See KUDU-2173 for more information.

For more details, and the complete list of changes in Kudu 1.6.0, please see the Kudu 1.6.0 release notes.

The Apache Kudu project only publishes source code releases. To build Kudu 1.6.0, follow these steps:

For your convenience, binary JAR files for the Kudu Java client library, Spark DataSource, Flume sink, and other Java integrations are published to the ASF Maven repository and are now available.