The SQL vs. NoSQL database split emerged in 2006-2007, but NoSQL’s compromises led developers to continue using SQL/RDBMS for critical workloads. However, recent changes in the NoSQL world have seen the adoption of ACID transactions, which were previously absent, and this post aims to inform architects of these changes and why they are happening now.
This post aims to help application developers understand the choice of SQL vs. NoSQL in the context of the data modeling needs of an application.
Prof. Daniel Abadi, lead inventor of the Calvin transaction management protocol and the PACELC theorem, wrote a thought-provoking post last month titled “NewSQL database systems are failing to guarantee consistency, and I blame Spanner”. The post takes a negative view of software-only Google Spanner derivative databases such as YugabyteDB and CockroachDB that use Spanner-like partitioned consensus for single shard transactions and a two phase commit (2PC) protocol for multi-shard (aka distributed) ACID transactions.
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YugabyteDB embraces open source with an Apache 2.0 license and self-governance, focusing on user-driven contributions and sustainable business growth. It aims to balance open source and commercial features, addressing the cloud provider challenge by building high-value, user-loved products.
Explore how consensus-based replication gets implemented in distributed databases, and dive into Paxos and Raft, the most commonly used leader-based consensus protocols
After billions of dollars in capital expenditure and reference customers in every major vertical, Google Cloud Platform has finally emerged as a credible competitor to Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure when it comes to enterprise-ready cloud infrastructure. While Google Cloud’s compute and storage offerings are easier to understand, making sense of its various managed database offerings is not for the faint-hearted. This post introduces app developers to the major Google Cloud database services,
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In this blog, we dive deeper into Percolator and Spanner as well as the open source databases (YugabyteDB for example) that they have inspired
First-generation NoSQL databases dropped ACID guarantees with the rationale that such guarantees are needed only by old-school enterprises running monolithic, relational applications in a single private data center. And the premise was that modern distributed apps should instead focus on linear database scalability along with low latency, mostly-accurate, single-key-only operations on shared-nothing storage (e.g. those provided by the public clouds).
Application developers who blindly accept the above reasoning are not serving their organizations well.
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Learn the basics of database storage engines, incl. B-tree and LSM tree based storage engines that are popular in the context of modern distributed cloud apps
ACID transactions are a fundamental building block when developing business-critical, user-facing applications. They simplify the complex task of ensuring data integrity while supporting highly concurrent operations. While they are taken for granted in monolithic SQL/relational databases, distributed NoSQL/non-relational databases either forsake them completely or support only a highly restrictive single-row flavor (see sections below). This loss of ACID properties is usually justified with a gain in performance (measured in terms of low latency and/or high throughput).
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