3.18 (December 16 2015)

Compatibility Changes

ENGINE-940 Minimum Java version is now Java 7

Oracle stopped supporting Java 6 in February 2013 and plans to stop supporting Java 7 in April 2015.

The Discovery Search Engine will now require a minimum of Java 7 to run, customers are encouraged to upgrade to Java 8 which is the current supported version from Oracle.

Related tickets: ENGINE-948, ENGINE-949, ENGINE-950, ENGINE-1007.

ENGINE-992 Calculate API for geoloc distances no longer rounded

The calculate API which could be used to obtain distance from a point for items in the current page of results used to round the distances to just 3 decimal places. It now returns full float precision distances (6 decimal places).

ENGINE-992 Scoring precision changed from double to float

To take better advantage of Apache Lucene in the upcoming 4.0 release of the Discovery Search Engine we’ve changed our scoring algorithms to use float instead of double. This downgrades the precision from about 12 decimal places to 6.

You will want to adjust your queries if you are using any weight, normalDistance, cullDistance, or exactDistance options that have values which cause scores to be less than 0.000001 (1e-6).

Improvements

ENGINE-968 Upgrades Apache Lucene from 4.7.2 to 4.10.4

The version of Apache Lucene used for text search has been upgraded from 4.7.2 to 4.10.4. This was previously stalled as 4.7.2 was the last release compatible with Java 6.