Dear Spring community,

On behalf of the Spring Data team and everyone who contributed, it is my pleasure to announce that Spring Data 2021.1.0 has entered its release candidate phase by releasing RC1 today. It is available from the milestone repository. This release ships with several tickets fixed. The most notable changes are:

• Deprecate support for RxJava 2 in preparation for removal of RxJava 2 support with Spring Data 3.0.
• Fluent Query API for Querydsl and Query-by-Example, allowing for projections, pagination, and consuming results as a Stream.
• Spring Data JDBC ships with a refined SQL DSL, accepting complex JOIN conditions and subselects.
• Support for exists and not empty keywords in Elasticsearch repository query methods and support for field exclusion in source.
• Improve mapping performance for custom queries and paths in Neo4j and support for ReactiveQuerydslPredicateExecutor.

We are working towards the GA release in early November. Looking ahead, our focus shifts towards Spring Data 3.0 development with a Java 17 and Jakarta EE 9 baseline. Spring Data 3.0 development will be an ongoing endeavor throughout the next year. We plan to adhere to our 6-month release cadence, so you should expect a lighter Spring Data 2.7 (2022.0) feature release shipping mostly bug fixes and dependency upgrades in May of 2022.

Please give Spring Data 2021.1.0-RC1 a try (for example, as part of the upcoming Spring Boot 2.6.0-RC1 release), which will be available start.spring.io soon, and let us know about any regressions or other issues.

Here are the detailed links to each individual artifact and the reference documentation:

• Spring Data Commons 2.6 RC1 - Artifacts - Javadoc - Documentation - Changelog
• Spring Data JDBC 2.3 RC1 - Artifacts - Javadoc - Documentation - Changelog
• Spring Data JPA 2.6 RC1 - Artifacts - Javadoc - Documentation - Changelog
• Spring Data KeyValue 2.6 RC1 - Artifacts - Javadoc - Documentation - Changelog
• Spring Data for Apache Cassandra 3.3 RC1 - Artifacts - Javadoc - Documentation - Changelog
• Spring Data for Apache Geode 2.6 RC1 - Artifacts - Javadoc - Documentation - Changelog
• Spring Data Neo4j 6.2 RC1 - Artifacts - Javadoc - Documentation - Changelog
• Spring Data MongoDB 3.3 RC1 - Artifacts - Javadoc - Documentation - Changelog
• Spring Data R2DBC 1.4 RC1 - Artifacts - Javadoc - Documentation - Changelog
• Spring Data LDAP 2.6 RC1 - Artifacts - Javadoc - Documentation - Changelog
• Spring Data Envers 2.6 RC1 - Artifacts - Javadoc - Documentation - Changelog
• Spring Data REST 3.6 RC1 - Artifacts - Javadoc - Documentation - Changelog
• Spring Data Redis 2.6 RC1 - Artifacts - Javadoc - Documentation - Changelog
• Spring Data Elasticsearch 4.3 RC1 - Artifacts - Javadoc - Documentation - Changelog
• Spring Data Couchbase 4.3 RC1 - Artifacts - Javadoc - Documentation - Changelog