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Sidra Data Platform (version 2025.04: Charming Ceceda)

Released on April 11, 2025

Subtle Magic

The 2025.04 release brings a host of refined enhancements and meaningful new capabilities to the Sidra Data Platform. While not the flashiest release, it marks steady progress in strengthening Sidra's foundation and user experience. This month, we've focused on usability, automation, and marketplace readiness—laying the groundwork for more feature-packed upcoming features.

Sidra 2025.04 Release Highlights

Data Catalog Service

While the Data Catalog has been a foundational part of Sidra since its earliest versions, it now officially graduates to a dedicated service within the platform. This evolution brings architectural and operational benefits: the catalog can now be managed and upgraded independently, reducing the complexity of Sidra Core and enabling faster iteration on catalog-specific features.

AI Generated Descriptions For Data Catalog

As part of this release, we've introduced AI-powered metadata description generation, which uses sampled data to automatically suggest and populate meaningful descriptions for entities and attributes. This streamlines documentation efforts, improves data discoverability, and sets the stage for more intelligent metadata management in the future.

New Sidra Installer

We're introducing a new web UI for installing Sidra, designed to simplify and guide users through the deployment process from the very first step. This new installer interface provides:

  • Clear instructions and pre-requisite checks
  • A streamlined, user-friendly parameter configuration flow
  • A more accessible and intuitive onboarding experience

This new installer is used to deploy Sidra Supervisor, which in turn orchestrates the installation of the rest of the platform. While the automation of the installation experience has always been a critical part of Sidra's philosophy, this is a major step forward in usability.

In addition to simplifying setup, this upgrade lays the groundwork for the upcoming Azure Marketplace deployment, currently under internal testing and expected to be available soon. Stay tuned!

Databricks Runtime Upgrade For Data Products

In this release, we've upgraded all Sidra Data Product templates to use the Databricks Runtime 15.4 LTS. This LTS version brings improved Spark 3.5.0 performance, enhanced error reporting, and native support for Python 3.11, ensuring a stable, future-proof foundation for Data Products with reduced upgrade cycles and broader compatibility. This also ensures consistency with Sidra Core, which already runs on 15.4 LTS.

Other Improvements

In addition to the major features and enhancements in this release, we have made several smaller improvements to the platform:

  • Enhanced the resilience of communications with the new installer messaging infrastructure
  • Package Updates:
    • Bumped multidict==6.0.4 to multidict==6.0.5
    • Bumped yarl==1.9.4 to yarl==1.9.11
    • Bumped zope.interface==6.1 to zope.interface==7.0.3

Issues Resolved in Sidra 2025.04

This release of Sidra only includes one bug fixed, so this time it will be a short list:

  • Fixed an issue for the DSU installation where it is not deployed because the subscription needed for the event that launch the deployment was not created. #9017

Coming soon

In our next release, Sidra will be taking a significant step forward in deployment ease and supportability. One of the most anticipated additions is our official integration with the Azure Marketplace, which will simplify the deployment and procurement processes and make it easier than ever for organizations to start using Sidra with just a few clicks.

We're also upgrading the Sidra Core to .NET 8, aligning with Microsoft's latest LTS version to bring improved performance, better resource utilization, and long-term support across the platform. Alongside this, we are introducing several supportability enhancements for Data Products that will improve diagnostics, observability, and maintainability, making it easier for teams to monitor and troubleshoot their workloads.

Finally, this release will mark the transition of Sidra services to a dedicated Azure Container App environment, further boosting scalability and service isolation. All of these improvements are part of our ongoing effort to make Sidra faster and easier to manage.

We Want Your Feedback

Your ideas make Sidra better. For suggestions, issues, or questions, please reach out to us at [email protected].