Manticore Search 27.1.5: Authentication, sharded tables, conversational search and faster vector search

Manticore Search released version 27.1.5 with built-in authentication and authorization, sharded tables, conversational search, and faster vector search. The update also includes improvements to HNSW builds, faceting, and aggregations, along with fixes for KNN, replication, and protocol compatibility.

Manticore Search 27.1.5 /install/ has been released. This release brings built-in authentication and authorization, sharded tables, conversational search, faster HNSW builds, better faceting and aggregations, and a long list of fixes across KNN, replication, protocol compatibility and other areas. This post is a catch-up for everything shipped from 25.0.1 through 27.1.5 . Upgrade Notes Please review these before upgrading: 27.0.0 adds built-in auth/authz, and enabling it changes access assumptions. Auth is not enabled by default, but once you enable it, anonymous access no longer works. Roll it out in stages: upgrade remote agents and replication peers first, then upgrade the masters that query or manage them, and enable auth only after the whole topology is on the new version. Distributed remote-agent and replication-related operations also need matching stored auth data across the participating daemons. A successful JOIN CLUSTER replaces the joining node's local auth data with the donor cluster's auth data. Issue 2833 https://github.com/manticoresoftware/manticoresearch/issues/2833 , PR 3648 https://github.com/manticoresoftware/manticoresearch/pull/3648 26.0.0 changed replication storage layout. Incoming replicated tables now live under the normallayout instead of the cluster data dir/<table path . If you run replication clusters with a custom path , you may need to move or re-synchronize replicated tables after upgrade. Downgrade is only safe before the new layout is adopted. Issue 4431 https://github.com/manticoresoftware/manticoresearch/issues/4431 , PR 4598 https://github.com/manticoresoftware/manticoresearch/pull/4598 If you manage MCL separately from the daemon, upgrade it together with Manticore. This release line moves through several MCL https://github.com/manticoresoftware/columnar updates, from vector-performance work to multithreaded HNSW builds and later stability fixes. Mixing an older library with a newer daemon is not recommended. 25.2.0 https://github.com/manticoresoftware/manticoresearch/releases/tag/25.2.0 , 25.15.0 https://github.com/manticoresoftware/manticoresearch/releases/tag/25.15.0 , 26.0.3 https://github.com/manticoresoftware/manticoresearch/releases/tag/26.0.3 , 26.3.2 https://github.com/manticoresoftware/manticoresearch/releases/tag/26.3.2 , 27.1.0 https://github.com/manticoresoftware/manticoresearch/releases/tag/27.1.0 Highlights Built-in authentication and authorization Manticore now supports users, passwords, bearer tokens, and fine-grained permissions https://manual.manticoresearch.com/Security/Authentication and authorization across MySQL, HTTP/HTTPS, distributed remote agents, and replication-related operations. This makes access control a first-class part of the product instead of something that always has to be handled outside the database. Sharded tables Manticore can now create and manage sharded tables https://manual.manticoresearch.com/Creating a table/Creating a sharded table/Creating a sharded table , distribute inserts across shards, and handle more of the surrounding lifecycle in one place. That makes larger write-heavy deployments easier to operate and reduces the amount of sharding-specific logic that has to live outside the engine. Conversational search This release adds conversational search https://manual.manticoresearch.com/Searching/Conversational search to Manticore Search. It is exposed through CREATE CHAT MODEL https://manual.manticoresearch.com/Searching/Conversational search and , so you can ask questions over an existing vectorized table instead of building a separate retrieval layer around the same data. https://manual.manticoresearch.com/Searching/Conversational search CALL CHAT Under the hood, Manticore Search runs KNN on a FLOAT VECTOR field, builds LLM context from that field's from='...' source columns, keeps conversation history by conversation uuid , and returns both the answer and the supporting sources . If you already keep embeddings in Manticore, this makes document Q&A and support-style assistants much easier to wire up. Faster vector builds and KNN improvements Vector search kept improving throughout this cycle. Manticore improved KNN performance, added local ONNX embeddings support, sped up ONNX inference, and then made HNSW build and rebuild work much faster with multithreaded index construction. A few important steps in that work: 25.1.0 https://github.com/manticoresoftware/manticoresearch/releases/tag/25.1.0 improved KNN distance calculation and AVX-512 loading. 25.2.0 https://github.com/manticoresoftware/manticoresearch/releases/tag/25.2.0 added local ONNX embeddings support in MCL and improved vector-search performance further. 25.14.0 https://github.com/manticoresoftware/manticoresearch/releases/tag/25.14.0 and 25.15.0 https://github.com/manticoresoftware/manticoresearch/releases/tag/25.15.0 added multithreaded HNSW builds together with the required library support. The biggest practical improvement here is a much faster auto-embedding and shorter build and rebuild time for large vector tables. Initial KNN builds, chunk merges, and ALTER TABLE ... REBUILD KNN are all affected. Better faceting and aggregations Faceting and aggregations also became more useful. facet filter mode https://manual.manticoresearch.com/Searching/Faceted search makes it easier to build e-commerce-style filters that preserve selected, available, and unavailable buckets under active filtering. On the analytics side: gained date histogram time zone and offset - Opensearch dashboards support - Manticore added statistical aggregations such as percentiles , percentile ranks , and mad Other Notable Improvements This release line also includes several smaller but useful additions: validates configuration before startup without side effects. searchd --check lets a node leave a replication cluster online without restarting. EXIT CLUSTER makes it possible to index very long machine-generated tokens such as hashes and message IDs without silent truncation. dict=keywords 32k - The built-in Ukrainian lemmatizer https://manual.manticoresearch.com/Creating a table/NLP and tokenization/Morphology morphology expands native morphology support for Ukrainian text search. Systemd https://github.com/manticoresoftware/manticoresearch/releases/tag/25.4.0 improves startup and shutdown supervision. Type=notify searchd process under systemd management now logs to systemd journal JOIN queries now support explicit left-table column prefixes.- OpenSearch Dashboards support. manticore-load gained multi-query support. Bug Fixes This release line also includes 65 changelog-listed fixes . The latest follow-up releases added a few more worth calling out: - 27.1.5 fixed a crash when fetching columnar float vector attributes. - 27.1.4 fixed ALTER TABLE ... RECONFIGURE and SHOW CREATE TABLE for one-way upgrades from dict='keywords' to dict=keywords 32k . - 27.1.3 updated Buddy to 4.0.1 and tightened Queue-plugin mutation permission handling under auth. - KNN-by- doc id queries now preserve offset and max matches correctly. - KNN rescoring order was fixed, so explicit ORDER BY tie-breakers work again. - Hybrid fused queries with GROUP BY on columnar tables stopped crashing. - Replication and node-rejoin crash paths were cleaned up further. - Binary MySQL protocol behavior was fixed in 25.12.1, which matters for integrations that expect real client compatibility. - Fluent Bit bulk-ingest interoperability was fixed, preventing successful responses from being replayed as duplicate inserts. - 27.1.2 fixed sql attr multi handling for plain indexes built from multiple source blocks. For the complete list, see the changelog https://manual.manticoresearch.com/Changelog . Need help or want to connect? - Join our Slack https://slack.manticoresearch.com - Visit the Forum https://forum.manticoresearch.com - Report issues or suggest features on GitHub https://github.com/manticoresoftware/manticoresearch/issues - Email us at email protected /cdn-cgi/l/email-protection