YugabyteDB: The best distributed SQL database for creating large-scale cloud-native apps

Every company has its own choice of product lines that best suits the demands of their company and YugabyteDB is a high-performance, geo-distributed, auto-sharded SQL database designed for resilience and scale that offers a choice in products.

The co-founders of YugabyteDB are database developers and operators who first connected at Facebook, where they helped the social media giant grow from a few million to billions of users in a matter of years. The group wagered that the trends they witnessed — microservices, containerization, high availability, global dispersion, highly sought-after APIs for developers, and a voracious appetite for open source — would eventually impact the majority of organizations, if not all of them. Together, they created YugabyteDB, a distributed SQL database designed to power cloud-native applications operating on a global scale, in February 2016.

The founders open-sourced formerly commercial functionality and launched YugabyteDB as 100% open source under the Apache 2.0 license in July 2019, against the trend of other database firms who were pushing features into closed source offerings.

YugabyteDB is a contemporary database that is provided as a flexible service, combining enterprise-grade relational database features with inherent resilience and on-demand scaling. To put it another way, YugabyteDB has evolved to a distributed, cloud-native design while maintaining the strength and familiarity of PostgreSQL. The way apps are created now are different. However, if outdated monolithic databases are still being utilizing, it most likely will lead to increased organizational risk, greater operating expenses, and decreased developer productivity.

The various uses of YugabyteDB  

Through YugabyteDB, it is easier to adopt a contemporary distributed database and completely embrace the cloud native world.

Database Modernization

Modern, cloud-native programs were not intended to use legacy databases. YugabyteDB can increase productivity with a contemporary distributed data layer that combines the durability, scale, and geo-distribution of cloud-native databases with relational data modeling and strong RDBMS capabilities.

Cloud-native applications

Resilient and highly scalable architectures are required for cloud-native applications. YugabyteDB is made to be highly resilient to hardware and cloud failures, scale quickly across distributed clusters, and operate anywhere — all characteristics that are ideal for building microservice-based and Kubernetes applications.

Edge and Streaming

Despite the fact that streaming apps get data from the edge and combine it in the cloud, IT silos are not necessary in today's environment. YugabyteDB is a flexible cloud native database designed for the hybrid and heterogeneous environments that power streaming apps globally.

The Advantages of Adopting YugabyteDB

YugabyteDB is a flexible cloud-based PostgreSQL database optimized for both new and legacy business-critical applications, some the advantages they provide are mentioned below:

• Horizontal Scalability: Rapidly scale out and in to easily respond to changing business demands
• High Availability: Survive node, zone, region and data center failures with resilient data
• Geo-Distribution: Distribute data globally with consistent, ACID transactions
• Multi-API: Use the PostgreSQL API or the semi-relational API based on CQL
• PostgreSQL Compatibility: Enjoy the most PostgreSQL compatible distributed SQL database on the planet
• Multi-Cloud: Span public, private and hybrid clouds to avoid lock-in and enjoy cloud freedom
• Open Source: Enjoy the security and transparency from 100% open source database
• Native Security: Protect data with a database designed with security as a top priority

Database sharding, a key concept at YugabyteDB

The technique of dividing huge database tables into smaller units called shards is known as database sharding. A horizontal data division containing a portion of the entire data set is called a shard. It has some of the responsibility for handling the total workload. Horizontal partitioning is another name for database sharding and can help prevent unanticipated database failures, guarantee low-cost, and high availability. The conventional tabular view of a database is where the distinction between horizontal and vertical partitioning originates.

Scaling complex application demands is a limitation of monolithic databases. Reduced CPU, memory, and storage capacity lead to slower query throughput and response times. Database sharding, in particular, allows application workloads to scale by releasing computer power to handle incoming requests that will result in quicker index construction and query response times or eliminate unscheduled database outages by maintaining high availability to ensure that the database remains accessible even in the event of a failure of one or more database nodes.

Uneven shard allocation is one of the major problems with manual sharding. Shards that have been distributed erratically may become uneven, with some shards being overloaded while others are comparatively empty. On a shard, it's advisable to limit the amount of data accumulated because hotspots can cause server failures and slowdowns. Lastly, operating procedures may become more complex due to manual sharding. Multiple servers will now require backups to be performed. To guarantee a database shard has the same schema copy, data migration and schema modifications need to be properly synchronized. Database joined across several servers can be quite laborious and inefficient if not properly optimized.

Revolutionizing logistics through collaboration

Bill Cook is the CEO and board member of YugabyteDB.

“YugabyteDB is a cloud native RDBMS that can handle your most demanding workloads, today and in the future.”