Summary
This release introduces major new capabilities for tenant operations, security, and auditing, along with important performance enhancements, guardrails, and stability improvements across Apache Pinot and StarTree components.π New Features
Tenant Rebalance
You can now rebalance resources at the tenant level.- Applies automatically to all tables within a tenant.
- Internally orchestrates table-level rebalances to provide a seamless experience.
- Helps optimize resource distribution across large multi-tenant clusters.
Row-level RBAC
Row-level access control (RLAC) enables fine-grained data security.- Define row-level filters using SQL expressions.
- Access is restricted to roles authorized for the corresponding filter.
- Enforce per-user or per-team visibility rules without duplicating datasets.
Pinot Audit Logs
Pinot now supports auditing of cluster operations.- Capture audit events from Controller and Broker components.
- Persist logs in Pinotβs deep store for long-term archival.
- Configurable options for logging headers and payloads to meet compliance and debugging needs.
β‘ Improvements
Text Index Pinning for Tiered Storage
Users can now configure a text index when using cloud tiered storage and be able to pin it locally for accelerating query performance. Read full documentation here: https://docs.startree.ai/corecapabilities/manage-data/set-up-tiered-storage/use-text-indexTable Deletion & Creation
Enhanced validations and cleanup improve operational reliability:- Deletion:
- Automatically removes Minion tasks that are not IN_PROGRESS.
- Fails gracefully with clear error messages if tasks are still running.
- Creation:
- Detects dangling task data from previous tables.
- Provides actionable error messages guiding users to retry deletion or manually clean up.
Table Rebalance Manager
- Introduces a single manager to handle rebalance jobs across the cluster.
- Prevents multiple jobs from running simultaneously on the same table.
- Tracks and reports progress of ongoing rebalances.
Pinot Server Restart Speedup
Server restart time is now 3x faster or more:- Reuses on-disk upsert metadata instead of rebuilding from snapshots.
- Typical restart time is now minutes per server, even with billions of primary keys.
- Improves operational ease for StarTree Upserts.
- Note: Requires clean shutdown. In case of unclean shutdown, servers fall back to snapshots.
π Bug Fixes & Stability
Pinot Guardrails
New safeguards to protect clusters against ingestion and query instability:- Block ingestion if primary key count exceeds thresholds.
- Validate conflicting indexing configurations that can cause ingestion failures.
- Validate multi-value column compatibility.
- Add throttling to prevent CPU spikes during ingestion or compaction.
- Prevent index build failures caused by malformed or bad data.
Stability Improvements
- Increased frequency of Upsert snapshot tasks for faster recovery.
- Improved filesystem (FS) call resilience: timeouts and retries added for GCS, ADLS, and S3.
- Changed default max length strategy: no more silent string truncation (previously caused ingestion failures with JSON columns).

