We got several questions about this in the mailing list, so I thought that this would be a good time to discuss this in the blog.

One of the best part about RavenDB is that we are able to deliver quickly and continuously.  That means that we can deliver changes to the users very rapidly, often resulting in response times of less than an hour from “I have an issue” to “it is already fixed and you can download it”.

That is awesome on a lot of level, but it lack something very important, stability. In other words, by pushing things so rapidly, we are living on the bleeding edge. Which is great, except that you tend to bleed.

That is why we split the RavenDB release process into Unstable and Stable. Unstable builds are released on a “several times a day” basis, and only require that we will pass our internal test suite. This test suite is hefty, over 1,500 tests so far, but it is something that can be run in about 15 minutes or so on the developer machine to make sure that our changes didn’t break anything.

The release process for Stable version is much more involved. First, of course, we run the standard suite of tests. Then we have a separate set of tests, which are stress testing RavenDB by trying to see if there are any concurrency issues.

Next, we take the current bits and push them to our own internal production systems. For example, at the time of this writing, this blog (and all of our assets) are currently running on RavenDB build 726 and have been running that way for a few days. This allows us to test several things. That there are no breaking changes, that this build can survive running in production over extended period of time and that the overall performance remains excellent.

Finally, we ask users to take those builds for a spin, and they are usually far more rough on RavenDB than we are.

After all of that, we move to a set of performance tests, comparing the system behavior on a wide range of operations compared to the old version.

And then… we can do a stable release push. Phew!