Vespa Product Updates, January 2019: Parent/Child, Large File Config Download, and a Simplified Feeding Interface

Vespa, an open-source big data processing and serving engine primarily developed by Yahoo engineers and used by platforms like Yahoo News and Yahoo Finance, has released several updates in January 2019 to enhance its functionality. These updates include the introduction of support for multiple levels of parent-child document references, allowing fields to be imported with minimal performance impact and simplifying updates in many-to-many relationship use cases like Product Search. Additionally, Vespa now supports file URL references in application packages, enabling the inclusion of large data files without storing them directly in the package, as they are automatically downloaded during redeployment. A new SyncFeedClient API for Java is also introduced to facilitate high-performance batch data feeding from systems without full streaming support, such as Kafka and DynamoDB. The Vespa team encourages community feedback and contributions to further improve these features.