Database 8.1.1.0 Release Notes

February 9, 2026  |  Download

New in this version

The 8.1.1.0 release introduces improvements to security and governance, developer experience, performance, and operational control — all designed for teams building and operating real-time systems at scale.

Security and governance

Data masking – protects sensitive information by replacing original values with transformed, non-identifiable data, ensuring it remains usable for testing and development while preventing unauthorized access.

• Data masking overview
• Data masking Quickstart

Developer experience

Preview: Path expressions – enable granular querying and indexing for nested List and Map structures using contextual expressions.

Performance enhancements

XDR recovery – Improved XDR recovery performance by parallelising recovery.

Operational control

• Preview: YAML configuration file – YAML configuration support is a preview feature that loads an Aerospike config file defined using YAML.
• Modified read-touch generation - Read-touch operations (which extend a record’s TTL based on readTouchTtlPercent) no longer advance the record generation counter.

Upgrade instructions

You can upgrade directly to Database 8.1.1.0 from releases 7.1.0.x through 8.1.0.x.

• For upgrade instructions, see Upgrade or repair an Aerospike server.
• For special upgrade instructions, see Special upgrades and downgrades.

Configuration updates

Item	Action	Notes
recovery-threads	added	configures the number of threads per datacenter (1-32) for use in parallel recovery.

Info command updates

Item	Action	Notes
release	added	consolidates legacy commands to return server release information in a single command
masking	added	adds, deletes, or changes the masking function to be applied for a given path
masking-show	added	returns all masking rules
build_arch	deprecated	use release instead
build_ee_sha	deprecated	use release instead
build_os	deprecated	use release instead
build_sha	deprecated	use release instead
build_time	deprecated
edition	deprecated	use release instead
version	deprecated	use release instead

Server log updates

Message	Action	Description
permitted: masking rule added	added	Audit log entry for successfully adding a masking rule.
permitted: masking rule removed	added	Audit log entry for successfully removing a masking rule.
role violation: unauthorized masking rule operation	added	Audit log entry for an unauthorized attempt to modify a masking rule.

Tools updates

• add diff deprecated in Tools 12.0.2. Use diff files instead.
• Admin port visual cue – When connecting asadm to a single node via the admin port, the Admin prompt is displayed in uppercase letters to indicate that the admin port is in use. For example: ADMIN> or ADMIN+>

Aerospike tools 12.1.0 is required for some of the features in Database 8.1.1. See Aerospike Tools release notes for more information.

Client/server feature compatibility

For a complete list of client features and the server versions that support them, see the Client Matrix.

Compatible client versions

For full feature access in Database 8.1.1:

• Java Client: 9.3.0
• Python Client: 19.0.0
• C# Client: 8.3.0
• C Client: 7.3.0
• Go Client: 8.6.0
• Node.js: 6.6.0
• Rust: 2.1.0

Compatible connector versions

• Trino connector 1.2.0 or later
• Spark connector 3.1.1 or later

Platform updates

See Platform support and compatibility for all currently supported platforms.

Product lifecycle updates

Database 8.1.1 is a generally available (GA) minor release. Support lifetimes are defined at the major version level, and minor releases do not extend the major version EOL. Aerospike provides bug fixes and security patches on the latest minor release of each supported major version; earlier minor releases stop receiving patches when a newer minor version becomes available.

See Aerospike Database versioning and releases and product stages for details.

Known issues

See Database known issues reference for details.

Complete list of changes

ID	Description
AER-6844	(INFO) Added ‘release’ info command.
AER-6847	(PACKAGING) Add support for Debian 13.
AER-6848	(PACKAGING) Improve performance of build process.
AER-6853	(SECONDARY INDEX) Reject sindex on expression creation when the expression’s result doesn’t match index parameters.
AER-6854	(PACKAGING) Remove support for Debian 11.
AER-6855	(XDR) Improved XDR recovery performance by parallelising recovery.
AER-6857	(TRANSACTIONS) Introduced data-masking features.
AER-6859	(PACKAGING) Added RHEL 10 support - removes support for OpenSSL version prior to 1.1.0.
AER-6861	(CONFIGURATION) Added experimental support for YAML configurations with JSON-schema validation.
AER-6868	(XDR) Improve forward compatibility by removing the deprecated ‘features’ command from the XDR client.
AER-6875	(SERVER) Add version limit in the feature key expired warning message.
AER-6876	(CDT) Introduced path expressions.
AER-6877	(XDR) Add assertion in XDR to validate total in progress counter.