NEWS

   1 RRDTOOL NEWS
   2 ============
   3
   4 #####################################
   5 Major Changes between 1.2.x and 1.3.x
   6 -------------------------------------
   7
   8 RRdtool dump / restore Incompatibilities
   9 ----------------------------------------
  10 rrdtool dump 1.3 does emit completely legal xml. Basically this means that
  11 it contains an xml header and a DOCTYPE definition. Unfortunately this
  12 causes older versions of rrdtool restore to be unhappy.
  13
  14 To restore a new dump with ann old rrdtool restore version, either remove
  15 the xml header and the doctype by hand (both on the first line of the dump)
  16 or use rrdtool dump --no-header.
  17
  18 NEW File access methods (Bernhard Fischer)
  19 -------------------
  20 * introduced file-accessor functions rrd_read/rrd_seek/rrd_write
  21 * implemented full mmap-based file access with madvise hints for improved
  22   scalability, much reduced memory-footprint and much less blocking on
  23   disk
  24 * implemented optional full file-descriptor access instead of FILE* access
  25
  26 NEW Graphing (Tobi Oetiker)
  27 --------
  28 * libart has been replaced by cairo/pango
  29 * pango markup is supported
  30 * full gridfitting
  31 * --graph-render-mode=mono for non antialiased graphing
  32 * --font-render-mode=mono for non antialiased fonts
  33 * fonts come through fontconfig, use the Pango fontnameing
  34   scheme -> 'Times 20' ... it is not possible to use
  35   truetype fonts directly anymore.
  36 * Tabs are position independent.
  37 * TRENDNAN filter that ignores NAN values while caculating the TREND data. (Timo Stripf)
  38 * --full-size-mode to specify the outer border of the image and not just of the graphing canvas (Matthew Chambers)
  39 * TEXTALIGN command to alter default text alignment behaviour
  40 * C API in-memory graphing with rrd_graph_v (Evan Miller)
  41 * draw dashed lines in graphs (Thomas Gutzler)
  42 * new interface graphv which returns inforamation using the rrd_info
  43   interface (Tobi Oetiker and Mark Plaksin)
  44
  45 NEW Forecasting (Evan Miller)
  46 -----------
  47 * the new MHWPREDICT consolidation function uses a variation of the Holt-Winters
  48   method. It is a drop-in replacement for HWPREDICT, and is better suited for
  49   data whose seasonal variations grow or shrink in proportion to the average.
  50
  51 * If you create an RRD with the new MHWPREDICT function, the resulting
  52   rrdfile will be version 0004 and can only be used in rrdtool 1.3.
  53
  54 Rewrites
  55 --------
  56 * rrd_restore now uses libxml for parsing which makes things much more
  57   tolerant towards xml variations. The old code could mostly just parse the
  58   xml as it was output by rrdtool dump. See also: 'incompatibilities' at the
  59   top of this document. (by Florian octo Forster)
  60
  61 * rrd_update rewritten to make it more modular. Fixed two longstanding
  62   HW bugs in the process (Evan Miller)
  63
  64 Internationalization (Takao Fujiwara and Tobi Oetiker)
  65 --------------------
  66 * The help output by rrdtool has been internationalized. There are no real
  67   translations included with rrdtool yet, contributions are welcome.
  68 * The internationalization will only be compiled if libintl and friends are
  69   available on your system. Use the configure option --disable-libintl if
  70   you want to disable this feature
  71
  72 Language Bindings
  73 -----------------
  74 * ruby rrd_fetch will return step as a last property -- Mike Perham
  75
  76 * python rrdtool.info does now conform with the data structure returned
  77   by the other language bindings. This is incompatible with the
  78   previous (broken) version --tobi
  79
  80 * python bindings got updatev support --tobi
  81
  82 * ruby, perl, python bindings support the new graphv interface --tobi
  83
  84 Locale Independent Numeric Input
  85 --------------------------------
  86 * Regardles of locale you are in, rrdtool always expects input to be numbers
  87   (LC_NUMERIC) in C or POSIX locale for numbers. (not 1,1 but 1.1) this is
  88   necessary to make things like RPN work as it uses , as a separator.
  89
  90 ######################################################################################
  91 Major Changes between 1.0.x and 1.2.x
  92 ======================================================================================
  93 Graphing
  94 --------
  95
  96 * rewritten graphics generation based on libart.
  97   - anti-aliased output
  98   - alpha transparency support
  99   - truetype fonts
 100
 101 * additional graphics formats: EPS, PDF, SVG
 102
 103 * extended multi-part documentation
 104
 105 * VDEF support; define and use variables.  Find, and use, the
 106   maximum rate seen by rrdtool; compute and show the average
 107
 108 * Sliding window (trend) analysis
 109   Compute a smoother average, for instance over the last 6 CDPs
 110
 111 * percentile (95th or other)
 112   Remove peaks, 95 percent of all rates are at or below the
 113   returned value
 114
 115 Logging
 116 -------
 117 * a second logging interface: rrdtool updatev
 118   Verbose updating of the database; show CPDs being created
 119
 120 * Aberrant Behavior Detection with Holt-Winters Forecasting
 121   Compare current data with expected data, detect and log when
 122   the rates are outside expected levels
 123
 124 * COMPUTE data type for artificial data-sources calculating their
 125   input using RPN math and data from the other data-sources.
 126
 127 Incompatibilities
 128 -----------------
 129 * Colons in COMMENT arguments to rrdtool graph must be escaped with a backslash
 130
 131 * the --alt-y-mrtg option is gone or rather since 1.2.7 it is back but
 132   without functionality.
 133
 134 * In pipe mode, rrdtool answers with OK only if it was successful with the
 135   command. Otherwhise the answer will be ERROR...
 136
 137
 138 Behind the Scenes
 139 -----------------
 140 * In order to support Holt-Winters and Calculated Datasources,
 141   the rrdtool data format has changed. While the new version of rrdtool can
 142   read files created with rrdtool 1.0.x. It is not possible to read files
 143   created by rrdtool-1.2.x with rrdtool-1.0.x
 144
 145 * External libraries are not included with rrdtool anymore. This is in line
 146   with todays trend of using shared libraries everywhere. With the exception
 147   of the cgi library most things required by rrdtool will be found on every recent
 148   system.
 149
 150 * Memory Mapped IO support for faster logging.