Dear colleagues, The RIPE NCC is pleased to announce the deployment of RIPE Database software release 1.79 to the Release Candidate (RC) environment: https://www.ripe.net/data-tools/db/release-notes/rc-release-candidate-enviro... <https://www.ripe.net/data-tools/db/release-notes/rc-release-candidate-environment> This release introduces the new attributes "created:" and "last-modified:" as part of the first phase of the deprecating the changed attribute in the RIPE Database. You can find more information about the three phases of this effort here: https://labs.ripe.net/Members/tim/deprecating-the-changed-attribute-in-the-r... <https://labs.ripe.net/Members/tim/deprecating-the-changed-attribute-in-the-ripe-database> It should be noted however that: = The new attributes will only be enabled in output this Thursday 2 April (because updating all objects with initial values takes a long time) = We have found that we needed to use the 1970-01-01T00:00:00Z instead of 0000-00-00T00:00:00Z (because it's invalid, and we observed inconsistencies in dealing with year 0 AD different libraries) We will update the referenced article shortly to reflect these changes. This release also changes attribute "referral-by" from mandatory to optional. This attribute is part of a mntner object for historical reasons and will be deprecated. Detailed release notes are published here: https://www.ripe.net/data-tools/db/release-notes/ripe-database-release-1.79 <https://www.ripe.net/data-tools/db/release-notes/ripe-database-release-1.79> Documentation for this release is published here: https://www.ripe.net/data-tools/support/documentation/ripe-database-document... <https://www.ripe.net/data-tools/support/documentation/ripe-database-documentation-1.79> Please let us know if you find any issues with this release. We plan to deploy this release to the production environment on Tuesday 28 April, and we plan to enable the new "created:" and "last-modified:" attributes the following Monday 4 May - after the initial values have been added for all objects. Please let us know if you have any questions or comments. Kind regards, Tim Bruijnzeels Assistant Manager Software Engineering RIPE NCC