Hey there!
This release marks another ground-up rewrite of OctoSQL. There were a lot of problems with the previous designs of OctoSQL. Fortunately, that is no more, and I hope there won't be any more rewrites in the future.
This is a big release, and there are major changes.
OctoSQL is now statically typed, so your queries get typechecked before being executed and the optimizer is much more robust thanks to that. Schemas are automatically inferred from datasources, so there are no usability tradeoffs to that.
Datasources are now decoupled from the main repository of OctoSQL, as OctoSQL now uses a plugin model. You can create new datasources for OctoSQL and just add an entry to the plugin repository for OctoSQL to be able to use it. The plugin subsystem is also specifically designed not to compromise on performance, which gets us to the final point...
Performance. OctoSQL is now much (orders of magnitude much) faster. You can expect 100x speed improvements across most use cases.
Overall, OctoSQL is now more robust, faster, easier to create plugins for, and has static verification of executed queries.
P.S.: It's also more lightweight and fully in-memory now, so you can easily embed it into your own applications either as a dataflow engine, or a SQL execution engine.