The Distributed SQL Blog

July 22, 2018

6 Signs You Might be Misunderstanding ACID Transactions in Distributed Databases

As described in A Primer on ACID Transactions, 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 datacenter. 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.

…

July 20, 2018

By Karthik Ranganathan

Community News Release Announcements

YugaByte Database Community & Engineering Update — July 20, 2018

Welcome to the inaugural edition of the YugabyteDB Community and Engineering update series! Let’s dive in and take a look at what has happened over the last few weeks.

Community News

There has been a lot of activity in terms of meetups and events. In June, YugaByte was at DockerCon. We also did a hands-on lab about building geo-distributed cloud apps at a Datariders meetup and a talk at Samsung about

…

How DynamoDB’s Pricing Works, Gets Expensive Quickly and the Best Alternatives

July 18, 2018

By Jimmy Guerrero

Amazon DynamoDB Amazon Web Services

How DynamoDB’s Pricing Works, Gets Expensive Quickly and the Best Alternatives

DynamoDB is AWS’s NoSQL alternative to Cassandra, primarily marketed to mid-sized and large enterprises. It works best for those who require a flexible data model, reliable performance, and the automatic scaling of throughput capacity. In a nutshell, DynamoDB’s monthly cost is dictated by data storage, writes and reads. Let’s walk through a synopsis.

11 Things You Wish You Knew Before Starting with DynamoDB

July 10, 2018

By Karthik Ranganathan

Amazon DynamoDB Amazon Web Services

11 Things You Wish You Knew Before Starting with DynamoDB

This post is to help developers and operations engineers understand the precise strengths and weaknesses of DynamoDB, especially when it needs to power a complex, large-scale application.

DynamoDB vs MongoDB vs Cassandra for Fast Growing Geo-Distributed Apps

July 10, 2018

By Karthik Ranganathan

Amazon DynamoDB Apache Cassandra Compare and contrast MongoDB YugabyteDB

DynamoDB vs MongoDB vs Cassandra for Fast Growing Geo-Distributed Apps

This post delves into the technical requirements of fast-growing geo-distributed applications with low latency reads and explores the limitations of Amazon DynamoDB for this use case, as well as alternative solutions such as MongoDB, Apache Cassandra, and YugabyteDB, a high-performance distributed SQL database.

A Busy Developer’s Guide to Database Storage Engines — The Basics

June 28, 2018

By Sid Choudhury

Databases Distributed SQL How It Works

A Busy Developer’s Guide to Database Storage Engines — The Basics

Editor’s note – This is the first part of a two-part series on database storage engines:

A Busy Developer’s Guide to Database Storage Engines — The Basics (this post)
A Busy Developer’s Guide to Database Storage Engines — Advanced Topics

When evaluating operational databases, developers building distributed cloud applications tend to focus on data modeling flexibility, consistency guarantees, linear scalability,

…

A Busy Developer’s Guide to Database Storage Engines — Advanced Topics

June 28, 2018

By Sid Choudhury

Databases Distributed SQL How It Works

A Busy Developer’s Guide to Database Storage Engines — Advanced Topics

In the first post of this two-part series, we learned about the B-tree vs LSM approach to index management in operational databases. While the indexing algorithm plays a fundamental role in determining the type of storage engine needed, advanced considerations highlighted below are equally important to take into account.

Consistency, Transactions & Concurrency Control

Monolithic databases, which are primarily relational/SQL in nature, support strong consistency and ACID transactions.

…

YugaByte Raises $16M to Expand Reach to Large Enterprises

June 12, 2018

By Kannan Muthukkaruppan

Company News

YugaByte Raises $16M to Expand Reach to Large Enterprises

I am excited to announce that YugaByte has raised $16M in additional funding in a round led by Dell Technologies Capital and our previous investor Lightspeed Venture Partners. Combined with our previous funding of $8M, YugaByte has now raised $24M to solve one of the most challenging problems in operational databases today — a cloud-native, high-performance distributed SQL database platform.

YugabyteDB, which hit the 1.0 GA milestone last month,

…

Docker, Kubernetes and the Rise of Cloud Native Databases

June 11, 2018

By Sid Choudhury

CockroachDB Containers Distributed SQL Docker Kubernetes

Docker, Kubernetes and the Rise of Cloud Native Databases

Containerized Stateful Services Are Here

Results from the 2018 Kubernetes Application Usage Survey should put to rest concerns enterprise users have had around the viability of Docker containers and Kubernetes orchestration for running stateful services such as databases and message queues. Its exciting to see that nearly 40% of respondents are running databases (SQL and/or NoSQL) using Kubernetes. This number will continue to grow in the months ahead.

…

May 21, 2018

By Karthik Ranganathan

Community News Distributed SQL How It Works Release Announcements

YugabyteDB 1.0 — A Peek Under The Hood

Modern user-facing apps, like E-Commerce and SaaS, frequently require features from multiple databases (broadly — SQL, NoSQL and a cache) to support their multi-workload needs. App developers are responsible for understanding and managing which pieces of data should be stored in which SQL and NoSQL database. Furthermore, the app is also responsible for moving data across the tiers (e.g. populating the cache on reads and invalidating it on writes). This greatly increases development and operational complexity,

…

The Distributed SQL Blog

Community News

Consistency, Transactions & Concurrency Control

Containerized Stateful Services Are Here

Learn More to Accelerate Your Retail Business