What is new in RavenDB 3.5. Exploring data in the dark

One of the things that tend to happen a lot when we are developing with a database is that we need to peek at the data, and a lot of the time, just looking at the data one document at a time isn’t good for us.

We noticed that a lot of users will create temporary indexes (usually map/reduce ones) to get some idea about what is actually going on in the database, or for one off reporting. That is pretty inefficient, and in order to handle that, we added the Data Exploration feature.

This feature gives you the option of exploring the data in details. You can even run the query over large data sets, doing some complex aggregations and looking at the results.

Note that this is an admin / developer only feature, we provide no API for this, because the idea is that we have a human sitting in front of the DB going… “Hmm.. I wonder about…”