I recall a couple of years back, in a LOD2 project review, one of the reviewers made a comment to the effect that OpenLink's open source strategy was in essence autistic. More precisely, that OpenLink made some things, released these at unanticipatable times, and lacked community engagement.
Since then the situation has improved somewhat with the code being on github and kept more or less up to date with maintenance.
There is no reason why users should not get bug fixes when they are made, nor why users should not get functionality previews.
Introducing v7fasttrack, a clone of the git repository, where maintenance goes real time, and where early releases of functionality are available for experimentation.
It is open kitchen, folks. You will see us slice the fish and mix the curry right in the dining room. You will see epic feats of pizza flipping -- something to regale your grandchildren with.
You will still have to place your orders with your waiter; we still won't have time to be on most lists and such but at least you will get the dish while it's hot.
In the immediate future, the "file-as-table" feature will be introduced via this channel. This is the capability to make CSV files look like tables, which was mentioned in the TPC-H bulk load article. This is key to bulk loading 100GB in 15 minutes on a single commodity server.
The query caching feature mentioned in the previous blog post is the next candidate for availability in this channel. If you have repeating long queries that do lookups with under a million triples or so, compile times will dominate and this will give significant acceleration.
The largest item to come is the availability of the analytics branch that has been discussed in the TPC-H series. It is basically complete, with implementations of most tricks discussed in the TPC TC paper, TPC-H Analyzed: Hidden Messages and Lessons Learned from an Influential Benchmark.
These are structured as branches, with safe maintenance to one side, and new features which potentially break things in their own branch. For example, with a much smarter optimizer in the analytics branch, it is conceivable some applications will get worse plans at first even if the benchmarks are good. Anyway, experimentation is safe.
These will be introduced in future blog posts, and the relevant documentation will be in the archive. The DocBook XML form will come later.
These features will migrate to the regular git in time. But you will not have to hold your breath waiting for this.
The next action is the publishing of the file table feature on the fast track. There will be a post on this next week.