On behalf of the MEMS Exchange, I am pleased to announce
the release of Durus-3.0a, available at
http://www.mems-exchange.org/software/durus/

The full list of changes is viewable on the web page and
included with the source, but here is the summary.

We added an incremental pack function, so a storage server can
continue to serve clients while a pack is in progress.  In
previous Durus versions, the storage server blocks requests
until the pack is complete.

The object serialization is changed to apply zlib compression
to the pickle of the object state.  Also the tids that were
part of packed object records are no longer used.  The
result, for our databases is a 25-50% reduction in size.

FileStorage has a new file format that includes a compressed
index of object records at the time of the last pack.  This
speeds up FileStorage (and hence StorageServer) startup time.

This is an alpha release, and probably stable, but there is
no reason for current Durus-2.0 users to rush to upgrade.
The release includes a script for converting between the two
FileStorage file formats if you want to experiment with it.

Let us know what you think.

- David Binger