Confluence 7.12 beta release notes
Development releases are not production ready. Development releases are snapshots of the ongoing Confluence development process. While we try to keep these releases stable, they have not undergone the same degree of testing as a full release, and could contain features that are incomplete or may change or be removed before the next full release.
No upgrade path. Because development releases represent work in progress, we cannot provide a supported upgrade path between development releases, or from any development release to a final release. You may not be able to migrate any data you store in a Confluence development release to a future Confluence release.
Atlassian does not provide support for development releases.
Issues with this beta?
Please raise an issue to tell us about it.
Highlights of 7.12.0-rc2
Released 7 April 2021
This release candidate contains a fix for CONFSERVER-61194
Highlights of 7.12.0-rc1
Released 1 April 2021
No significant changes in this release candidate
Highlights of 7.12.0-beta1
Released 5 March 2021
Unlock data and insights about your site
For DATA CENTER
The new data pipeline allows you to export current state data from Confluence, and then feed it into your favourite business intelligence platform (such as Tableau or PowerBI) where you can slice and dice it to suit your needs. With this data you can:
- generate reports and visualizations of your users’ activity
- provide organization leaders with a better understanding of how their teams use Confluence
- make decisions about optimizing or cleaning up Confluence
The raw data includes things like titles, URLs, users, creation and modification dates for pages, attachments, and comments.
You can trigger the export of current state data from Confluence via the REST API, and view the status of your exports at Administration menu 
, then General Configuration > Data pipeline.
The initial export can take some time, and there's some performance and security considerations for you to be aware of, before kicking off your first export.
Learn more about the data pipeline
Diagnostic information now included in thread dumps
For DATA CENTER SERVER
If Confluence is experiencing problems, Atlassian Support may ask for a set of thread dumps to help diagnose the problem.
We now include the username and request URL in thread names, which can help us identify and troubleshoot issues faster.
This is turned on by default. If you don’t want to include these details, you can switch off diagnostics at Administration menu , then General Configuration > Troubleshooting and support tools > Thread diagnostics.
Learn more about thread diagnostics
Upgrade notes
Change to database validation query configuration
Confluence uses a database validation query to check that a database connection is alive before attempting to use it. There are several different ways to perform this validation query. From Confluence 7.12, we now let the database driver choose how to validate if a connection is still alive, rather than overriding the driver configuration with a particular validation query. This simplifies the configuration, and did show a small performance improvement in many of our tests.
setenv file improvements
We've added some commentary to the setenv.sh and setenv.bat file to make it easier for you to locate and manage commonly modified Java options and system properties, and added some recommended values for large instances.
As always, we strongly recommend checking that the default Java options haven't changed, before copying over your previous configuration. Here's a summary of the changes.
Removed
The following options were removed, as they are the default from Java 8 onwards, so don't need to be set explicitly.
-XX:+UseCodeCacheFlushing
-XX:-PrintGCDetails
-XX:-PrintTenuringDistribution
-XX:+PrintGCCauseWe also removed the following properties, which means Confluence will fall back to the default for your Java version. See the note below about a known issue with TLS1.3 and some early Java 11 versions. You can always reinstate these properties if you need specific protocols.
-Djdk.tls.server.protocols=TLSv1.1,TLSv1.2
-Djdk.tls.client.protocols=TLSv1.1,TLSv1.2Added
The following option was added, which changes the default behaviour of system.gc.
-XX:+ExplicitGCInvokesConcurrentThe following options are recommended for medium, large, and enterprise sized sites. These have been added as comments, and can be uncommented if you choose to adopt these recommended values.
-XX:ReservedCodeCacheSize=384m
-XX:+PrintTenuringDistribution
-XX:+PrintGCDetails -XX:+PrintGCTimeStamps
-Dconfluence.upgrade.recovery.file.enabled=false We have also updated the service.bat file to make it consistent with the values in setenv.bat. If you've modified this file previously, make sure you update the new file, rather than copying over your existing file.
PostgreSQL 11 support
We've added support for PostgreSQL 11. If you plan to upgrade, you should upgrade Confluence first, then upgrade your database.
See pg-upgrade in the PostgreSQL 11 documentation for information on how to upgrade your database. Make sure you back up your database, Confluence installation directory and Confluence home directory before you begin. We strongly recommend you test your changes in a staging environment first.
After upgrading, we recommend you run ANALYZE. Analyze collects statistics about the contents of tables in the database, which the query planner can use to help determine the most efficient execution plans for queries.
TLS1.3 known issue
There are some known issues with Java 11 and TLS 1.3, so if you're not using the bundled Java version, make sure you're running Java 11.0.8 or later to avoid problems.
Supported platforms changes
Advance Notice: End of support for Microsoft Edge Legacy
In January 2020 Microsoft released a new Microsoft Edge browser based on Chromium. As Microsoft have announced plans to end support for Microsoft Edge Legacy, we have also decided to end support for Microsoft Edge Legacy.
Confluence 7.12.x is the last release to support Microsoft Edge Legacy.
Advance Notice: End of support for PostgreSQL 9.6
Confluence 7.13.x will be the last release to support the following database:
- PostgreSQL 9.6
For more information on these notices, see End of Support Announcements for Confluence.
Infrastructure changes
Confluence 7.12 contains changes that may affect apps. Head to Preparing for Confluence 7.12 to find out how these changes will impact app developers.