What is New in NDB Cluster The maximum offset for a fixed-width column of an  NDB  table is 8188 bytes; this is also unchanged from releases previous to 8.0.18. See Section 23.1.7.5, “Limits Associated with Database Objects in NDB Cluster” , for more information. See the descriptions of the individual API methods for more information. For all of the methods just listed, table column values to be compared much be of exactly matching types, including with respect to length, precision, signedness, scale, character set, and collation, as applicable. In addition, the default behaviour for offline index build work is modified to use all cores available to ndbmtd , rather limiting itself to the core reserved for the I/O thread. Doing so can improve restart and restore times and performance, availability, and the user experience. 3940 • Offline multithreaded index builds.   It is now possible to specify a set of cores to be used for I/O threads performing offline multithreaded builds of ordered indexes, as opposed to normal I/O duties such as file I/O ，  compression ，  or decompression. “Offline”  in this context refers to building of ordered indexes performed when the parent table is not being written to; such building takes place when an NDB  cluster performs a node or system restart, or as part of restoring a cluster from backup using ndb_restore --rebuild-indexes . • branch_col_ne() • branch_col_lt() • branch_col_le() • branch_col_gt() • branch_col_ge() • branch_col_eq() • NDB API enhancements.   Beginning with NDB 8.0.18,  NdbScanFilter::cmp()  and several comparison methods of  NdbInterpretedCode  can be used to compare table column values with each other. The affected  NdbInterpretedCode  methods are listed here: •In addition, in cases where data and SQL node host names not present in the management server’s hosts  file are used in the cluster configuration file,  ndb_mgmd  start times can be up to 20 times shorter than was previously the case. •Due to replacing the list data structure formerly used by  ndb_mgmd  for handling node properties from configuration data with a hash table, overall startup times for the management server have been decreased by a factor of 6 or more. • Improved ndb_mgmd startup times.   Start times for management nodes daemon have been significantly improved in NDB 8.0.18 and later, in the following ways: • Online column renames.   Beginning with NDB 8.0.18, columns of  NDB  tables can be renamed online, using  ALGORITHM=INPLACE . See Section 23.5.11, “Online Operations with ALTER TABLE in NDB Cluster” , for more information. • ndb_mgm SHOW command and single user mode.   Beginning with NDB 8.0.17, when the cluster in single user mode, the output of the management client  SHOW  command indicates which API or SQL node has exclusive access while this mode is in effect.