Published Release Notes

New form of the HBase rule

There is a new form of the HBase rule. While you cannot create any new instances of the Pega 7.1.7 HBase rule, legacy instances in your application remain functional. You can still use the Pega 7.1.7 instances of the HBase rule, but you cannot make changes to them.

Enhanced product rule form for easy application packaging

The enhanced product rule form allows you to add applications in Delta mode, which includes only the patch version of the rulesets that comprise the application rule. You can also use Global exclusions to exclude one or more rules that are not associated with a ruleset version.

These enhancements allow easy packaging of non-versioned rules that are often deployed separately and reduce the need to manually add them later.

For more information, see Product rules - Completing the Contents tab.

New data sets

There are three new types of data sets:

• HDFS Data Set, which reads and saves data from external, distributed Apache Hadoop file systems.
• HBase Data Set, which supports HBase storage.
• Stream Data Set, which processes the continuous data stream of events.

Real-time processing of data flows

It is possible to run, manage, and monitor data flows that use stream as their data source. You can create a new run from the Real-time processing landing page.

Updates no longer require redeploying the prweb.war file or the application server-specific EAR file

Updating from Pega 7.1.7 to later versions of Pega 7 no longer requires that you redeploy the prweb.war file or the application server-specific EAR file.

Note that upgrades from versions prior to Pega 7.1.7 still require that you redeploy these files.

Updated Rule-Utility-Function resolution

Rule-Utility-Function rules are now resolved based on ruleset.

Previously, if you had the same function @xyz() in different libraries in different rulesets, you could not call the function by using @xyz, because that would throw an exception.

The resolution process has since been updated so that rule resolution is now based on the highest ruleset in context. This update makes the function resolution process consistent with how rule resolution is performed for other rule types.

For more information, see Functions in expressions.

Define function input parameters on the Create or Save As forms

When creating or updating a Rule-Utility-Function ruleset in Designer Studio, use the Create or Save As forms to define or change parameters as a part of the form. The Parameters section on either of these forms allows you to set the function's name and Java type before opening the function.

Previously, you updated these fields on the Parameters tab for the function after the form was created. Moving these fields to the Create and Save As forms helps to proactively detect functions with the same signature in the same ruleset before saving the function.

For more information, see Defining function input parameters on the Create or Save As forms.

Support for Oracle TIMESTAMP data types

The Oracle TIMESTAMP data type is now fully supported throughout the Pega 7 data layer. The TIMESTAMP columns for data provide greater precision than the previously available DATE columns.

This release does not include any columns that use the TIMESTAMP data type at installation. However, after installation or upgrade:

• Any newly created columns (for example, those created when optimizing a property or defining a new table) use the TIMESTAMP column type.
• Any existing data still uses DATE values.
  • Oracle users can manually convert any existing DATE column types to use a TIMESTAMP column type instead.
  • Altering the column type for existing values in a column does not provide any greater precision for those values because they still use DATE values and not DATETIME values.

For more information, see DateTime property mapping in Oracle for Pega 7.

Updates to the Business Intelligence Exchange (BIX) product

The Business Intelligence Exchange (BIX) add-on has been updated with several new features. BIX 7.1.8 fully supports extraction of data from a Pega 7 multi-tenant instance. BIX can also now be run on Pega Cloud instances. Additionally, the new pxExtractDataWithArgs activity can be used by on-premises customers to schedule BIX runs by using Pega Platform agents.

For more information, see the BIX 7.1 User Guide.

Ability to periodically defragment the PR_SYS_LOCKS table

Lock management in Pega 7 is controlled through the database table PR_SYS_LOCKS. Because of the high volume of entries inserted into and deleted from this table during case processing, the data in the PR_SYS_LOCKS table can become highly fragmented, causing degraded performance over time.

You can now periodically defragment this table. The following Dynamic System Settings control when and how often defragmentation takes place using DefragSysLocksDaemon:

• syslocks/defragIntervalType

  • ​Custom interval type to run defragmentation

  • Set this first – determines whether defragmentation occurs daily at a specified hour or at a recurring interval

• ​syslocks/defragHourOfDay
  • ​​Used to run defragmentation at a specified hour
  • Accepts only integer values in the range 0-23
  • Example: run defragmentation daily at 1 AM by entering a value of "1"

  • Can be ignored if syslocks/defragIntervalType indicates a a specified periodic interval

• syslocks/defragIntervalInHours
  • Used to run defragmentation at specified periodic intervals
  • Accepts only integer values > 0

  • Example: run defragmentation every four hours by entering a value of "4"

  • Can be ignored if syslocks/defragIntervalType indicates a specified hour

For more information, see PEGA0056 alert monitors PR_SYS_LOCKS defragmentation performance.