[[breaking-changes-7.6]]
== Breaking changes in 7.6
++++
<titleabbrev>7.6</titleabbrev>
++++

This section discusses the changes that you need to be aware of when migrating
your application to Elasticsearch 7.6.

See also <<release-highlights>> and <<es-release-notes>>.

//NOTE: The notable-breaking-changes tagged regions are re-used in the
//Installation and Upgrade Guide

//tag::notable-breaking-changes[]
[discrete]
[[breaking_76_security_changes]]
=== Security changes

[discrete]
==== {es} API key privileges

If you use an API key to create another API key (sometimes called a
_derived key_), its behavior is impacted by the fix for
https://www.elastic.co/community/security[CVE-2020-7009].

When you make a request to create API keys, you can specify an expiration and
privileges for the API key. Previously, when you created a derived key, it had
no privileges. This behavior disregarded any privileges that you specified in
the {ref}/security-api-create-api-key.html[create API key API].

As of 7.6.2, this behavior changes. To create derived keys with no privileges,
you must explicitly specify an empty role descriptor. For example:

[source,js]
----
...
"role_descriptors": { 
    "no-privilege": {
    }
}
...
----
// NOTCONSOLE

//end::notable-breaking-changes[]

[discrete]
[[breaking_76_search_changes]]
=== Search changes

[discrete]
==== Deprecation of sparse vector fields
The `sparse_vector` field type has been deprecated and will be removed in 8.0.
We have not seen much interest in this experimental field type, and don't see
a clear use case as it's currently designed. If you have feedback or
suggestions around sparse vector functionality, please let us know through
GitHub or the 'discuss' forums.

[discrete]
==== Update to vector function signatures
The vector functions of the form `function(query, doc['field'])` are
deprecated, and the form `function(query, 'field')` should be used instead.
For example, `cosineSimilarity(query, doc['field'])` is replaced by
`cosineSimilarity(query, 'field')`.

[discrete]
==== Disallow use of the `nGram` and `edgeNGram` tokenizer names

The `nGram` and `edgeNGram` tokenizer names haven been deprecated with 7.6.
Mappings for indices created after 7.6 will continue to work but emit a
deprecation warning. The tokenizer name should be changed to the fully
equivalent `ngram` or `edge_ngram` names for new indices and in index
templates.