Mindscape Blog » Blog Archive » Announcing LightSpeed 5.5

Announcing LightSpeed 5.5

I’m pleased to announce that LightSpeed 5.5 is fresh out of the oven and ready for you!

What’s new?

Visual Studio 2015 support! This is a major driver behind the updated version number.

Provider enhancements

There has been a range of improvements made to various underlying database providers. They include:

Int64 mapping support in the Oracle provider
Backslash functionality selection option to the PostgreSQL9 provider
Fix an issue where explicitly closing of SQLite commands is needed when using projections
Improved string based parsing support for SQLite3
Added spatial data type support to MySQL

Bug fixes

We have resolved about 30 bugs that have been reported – either by users or by our Raygun crash reporting system. We appreciate the help in resolving some of these issues through the assistance of customers.

Future versions

We’ve been slower than usual in the last 18 months on making formal releases of LightSpeed. It doesn’t mean there’s no work being done on it, but rather that we’ve focused on bug fixes and querying performance improvements. These changes have been flowing out through the nightly build system. We do consider that LightSpeed is a mature product and that it’s working well for folks (we use it a lot ourselves also). We have always taken the approach that LightSpeed is opinionated and does not try to be all things to all people.

We’ll continue to make core improvements and support new versions of Visual Studio and associated frameworks.