We are glad to present the new 2.6.0 release of Beam. This release includes multiple fixes and new functionality, such as new features in SQL and portability.

We also spent a significant amount of time automating the release and fixing continuous integration. For more information, check the release notes.

New Features / Improvements

gRPC/Protobuf shading

• gRPC/protobuf is now shaded in the majority of Apache Beam Java modules. A few modules which expose gRPC/protobuf on the API surface still maintain a direct dependency.

Beam SQL

• Added support for the EXISTS and LIKE operators.
• Implemented SUM() aggregations.
• Fixed issues with the CASE expression.
• Added support for date comparisons.
• Added unbounded data support to LIMIT.

Portability

• Shared libraries for supporting timers and user state are now available for runner integration.
• Added a Universal Local Runner, which works on a single machine using portability and containerized SDK harnesses.
• The Flink Runner now accepts jobs using the Job API.

IOs

• Bounded SplittableDoFn (SDF) support is now available in all runners (SDF is the new I/O connector API).
• HBaseIO is the first I/O supporting Bounded SDF (using readAll).

SDKs

• Improved Python AvroIO performance.
• Python AvroIO has a use_fastavro option that uses fastavro instead of apache/avro, for a 3-6x speedup!

Other

• Updated various dependency versions.
• Improvements to stability, performance, and documentation.

List of Contributors

According to git shortlog, the following 39 people contributed to the 2.6.0 release. Thank you to all contributors!

Ahmet Altay, Alan Myrvold, Alexey Romanenko, Andrew Pilloud, Ankur Goenka, Boyuan Zhang, Charles Chen, cclauss, Daniel Oliveira, Elliott Brossard, Eric Beach, Etienne Chauchot, Eugene Kirpichov, Henning Rohde, Ismaël Mejía, Kai Jiang, Kasia, Kenneth Knowles, Luis Osa, Lukasz Cwik, Maria Garcia Herrero, Mark Liu, Matthias Feys, Pablo Estrada, Rafael Fernandez, Reuven Lax, Robert Bradshaw, Robert Burke, Robin Qiu, Ryan Williams, Scott Wegner, Rui Weng, Sergei Lebedev, Sindy Li, Thomas Weise, Udi Meiri, Valentyn Tymofieiev, XuMingmin, and Yifan Zou.