News

We are pleased to announce that Opal 5.0 is now available. Opal is OBiBa’s core data management application for biobanks.

This Opal 5.0 release requires Java 21.

Upgrade actions:

Java runtime: If the default Java installed in your system is not Java 21, you must install Java 21 (any vendor), update the path to the java executable in the file /etc/default/opal, and restart the opal service.
Plugins: go to the plugins administration page, download the updated version of the plugins and restart Opal.

In this release, some features are not supported anymore:

"Opal SQL" database schema type: deprecated in Opal 4.7, it is not supported anymore. Transfer data to "Tabular SQL" or MongoDB databases before upgrading.
Reporting: since reports or dashboards can be easily done outside of Opal using the Python or the R API, and in order to prevent a potential security issue, the reporting feature has been removed from this release. Report template files are still accessible.
Table values are not indexed: when indexing a table, only the variable statistic summaries are computed and stored, for further retrieval (by Mica). There is no more dependency on the Search plugin using Elasticsearch.

There are also new features and improvements:

R/DataSHIELD packages installation disabled: since it is not a good practice to install R packages from Opal (because of security considerations and of having a reproducible analysis environment: using Docker images is recommended), the R packages installation is disabled by default. A system setting can enable it, typically for R packages developers.
User permissions: by visiting a user's profile, an administrator can see all its permissions: the ones granted directly and the ones inherited from the groups he/she belongs to.
Graphical user interface: the web application interface has been completly rewritten in a modern and reactive way. If any feature is missing (most likely associated to variable derivation), please let us know.
Performance: Java 21 is notably faster than Java 8, and the new Opal version is more efficient in terms of memory usage.
Security: all dependencies have been updated to the latest versions, and the code has been reviewed to prevent any security issue.

Note: R/DataSHIELD and Pyhton libraries are fully compatible with this new version.

This release was possible thanks to the funding of the Leiden University Medical Center - LUMC and Maelstrom Research .