9.6.4: Databricks, AS2, and an MCP server
Native Databricks flow types, full AS2 support for EDI, a schema-driven X12 editor, and Etlworks itself became an MCP server.
Four things worth knowing about in 9.6.4.
Native Databricks support. Dedicated flow types for Delta: bulk load through COPY INTO, streaming CDC, and message-queue ingestion. Three MERGE strategies, TEXT-only staging temp tables that survive schema drift, Unity Catalog three-part naming, and both personal access token and OAuth service principal authentication. Picking a MERGE strategy.
AS2, sending and receiving. SHA-256 signing by default, 3DES and AES encryption, synchronous MDN receipts, and certificates as inline PEM, file path, or PKCS12 and JKS keystore. Ships as an AS2 connector for outbound traffic and an AS2 listener for inbound. What that does to an EDI program.
The X12 Message Designer, our schema-driven editor for EDI messages. Pick the segments you need, mark loops as repeating, and bind each element to a source field or a lookup query. It is now the primary path for building X12.
Etlworks became an MCP server. External AI clients connect at POST /rest/v1/ai-agent/mcp over JSON-RPC 2.0, authenticate with the same API key as the REST API, and reach the same tool catalog Simba, our AI agent, uses internally. Claude Desktop, Claude Code, Cursor, and Windsurf all connect. Setup guide.
Also in this release: Flow Findings, our dashboard of automatic flow-inspection reports across the instance; incident tracking in Resource Usage; conversational mapping in every editor; and post-step flow control in nested flows and Composer, our visual flow builder.