Future Behavior​

Any time that we add new functionality to EdgeDB we strive to do it in the least disruptive way possible. Deprecation warnings, documentation and guides can help make these transitions smoother, but sometimes the changes are just too big, especially if they affect already existing functionality. It is often inconvenient dealing with these changes at the same time as upgrading to a new major version of EdgeDB. To help with this transition we introduce future specification.

The purpose of this specification is to provide a way to try out and ease into an upcoming feature before a major release. Sometimes enabling future behavior is necessary to fix some current issues. Other times enabling future behavior can simply provide a way to test out the feature before it gets released, to make sure that the current project codebase is compatible and well-behaved. It provides a longer timeframe for adopting a new feature and for catching bugs that arise from the change in behavior.

The future specification is intended to help with transitions between major releases. Once a feature is released this specification is no longer necessary to enable that feature and it will be removed from the schema during the upgrade process.

Once some behavior is available as a future all new projects enable this behavior by default when initializing an empty database. It is possible to explicitly disable the future feature by removing it from the schema, but it is not recommended unless the feature is causing some issues which cannot be fixed otherwise. Existing projects don’t change their behavior by default, the future specification needs to be added to the schema by the developer in order to gain early access to it.

At the moment there is only one future available:

• nonrecursive_access_policies: makes access policies non-recursive and simplifies policy interactions.