Whats-new 2025.01.0 (#9919)

Author: dcherian

doc/whats-new.rst

@@ -14,10 +14,15 @@ What's New
 
     np.random.seed(123456)
 
-.. _whats-new.2024.12.0:
+.. _whats-new.2025.01.0:
 
-v.2024.12.0 (unreleased)
-------------------------
+v.2025.01.0 (Jan 3, 2025)
+-------------------------
+
+This release brings much improved read performance with Zarr arrays (without consolidated metadata), better support for additional array types, as well as
+bugfixes and performance improvements.
+Thanks to the 20 contributors to this release:
+Bruce Merry, Davis Bennett, Deepak Cherian, Dimitri Papadopoulos Orfanos, Florian Jetter, Illviljan, Janukan Sivajeyan, Justus Magin, Kai Germaschewski, Kai Mühlbauer, Max Jones, Maximilian Roos, Michael Niklas, Patrick Peglar, Sam Levang, Scott Huberty, Spencer Clark, Stephan Hoyer, Tom Nicholas and Vecko
 
 New Features
 ~~~~~~~~~~~~
@@ -26,14 +31,10 @@ New Features
 - Better support wrapping additional array types (e.g. ``cupy`` or ``jax``) by calling generalized
   duck array operations throughout more xarray methods. (:issue:`7848`, :pull:`9798`).
   By `Sam Levang <https://github.com/slevang>`_.
-
 - Better performance for reading Zarr arrays in the ``ZarrStore`` class by caching the state of Zarr
-  storage and avoiding redundant IO operations. Usage of the cache can be controlled via the
-  ``cache_members`` parameter to ``ZarrStore``. When ``cache_members`` is ``True`` (the default), the
-  ``ZarrStore`` stores a snapshot of names and metadata of the in-scope Zarr arrays; this cache
+  storage and avoiding redundant IO operations. By default, ``ZarrStore`` stores a snapshot of names and metadata of the in-scope Zarr arrays; this cache
   is then used when iterating over those Zarr arrays, which avoids IO operations and thereby reduces
   latency. (:issue:`9853`, :pull:`9861`). By `Davis Bennett <https://github.com/d-v-b>`_.
-
 - Add ``unit`` - keyword argument to :py:func:`date_range` and ``microsecond`` parsing to
   iso8601-parser (:pull:`9885`).
   By `Kai Mühlbauer <https://github.com/kmuehlbauer>`_.
@@ -53,6 +54,13 @@ Deprecations
   :py:func:`date_range` (:pull:`9882`).
   By `Kai Mühlbauer <https://github.com/kmuehlbauer>`_.
 
+Performance
+~~~~~~~~~~~
+- Better preservation of chunksizes in :py:meth:`Dataset.idxmin` and :py:meth:`Dataset.idxmax` (:issue:`9425`, :pull:`9800`).
+  By `Deepak Cherian <https://github.com/dcherian>`_.
+- Much better implementation of vectorized interpolation for dask arrays (:pull:`9881`).
+  By `Deepak Cherian <https://github.com/dcherian>`_.
+
 Bug fixes
 ~~~~~~~~~
 - Fix type annotations for ``get_axis_num``. (:issue:`9822`, :pull:`9827`).
@@ -62,11 +70,6 @@ Bug fixes
 - Fix interpolation when non-numeric coordinate variables are present (:issue:`8099`, :issue:`9839`).
   By `Deepak Cherian <https://github.com/dcherian>`_.
 
-
-Documentation
-~~~~~~~~~~~~~
-
-
 Internal Changes
 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
 - Move non-CF related ``ensure_dtype_not_object`` from conventions to backends (:pull:`9828`).