Project Roadrunner, which we announced at the Tech Congress and blogged about in June, is on track for a “Beta 1” release in October. Quick recap: the Roadrunner project has two major goals: adding support for the PostgreSQL relational database management system, and packaging a smaller, easier-to-manage set of functionality for either PostgreSQL or SQL Server.
This summer, the Ed-Fi ODS Platform development team has been working hard to translate the database structure scripts from SQL Server to PostgreSQL; modifying the WebAPI project code to be database engine neutral; and enhancing the PowerShell deployment scripts. The next pre-release of the application will be called Beta 1 – meaning that it will be largely functionally complete, although it will likely have multiple bugs and has had very little testing outside of developer environments. The Beta 1 version will support Data Standard 3.1.
Assuming that further testing goes well and defects have been corrected, the plan is to publish a Release Candidate version by late November. This version will be closer to production-ready. Because the ODS Platform development team is concurrently working on the Data Standard 3.2 release, the November edition of Roadrunner will likely target the newer data standard. We hope to have a final production-ready 1.0.0 release of Roadrunner soon after the winter holidays (early 2020).
Quite a few districts and vendors have expressed interest in running on PostgreSQL. To make this happen, we will need all the help we can get to test and optimize the release. Please stay tuned to #dev-roadrunner in Slack and click the “Watch” link on https://techdocs.ed-fi.org/display/EFTD/Roadrunner+Beta+1 to be notified as soon as we publish the Beta release
