The Distributed SQL Blog

August 14, 2018

Benchmarking an 18 Terabyte YugabyteDB Cluster with High Density Data Nodes

For ever-growing data workloads such as time series metrics and IoT sensor events, running a highly dense database cluster where each node stores terabytes of data makes perfect sense from a cost efficiency standpoint. If we are spinning up new data nodes only to get more storage-per-node, then there is a significant wastage of expensive compute resources. However, running multi-terabyte data nodes with Apache Cassandra as well as other Cassandra-compatible databases (such as DataStax Enterprise) is not an option.

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Apache Cassandra DB Architecture Fundamentals

August 9, 2018

By Jimmy Guerrero

Apache Cassandra How It Works

Apache Cassandra DB Architecture Fundamentals

What is the Apache Cassandra Database?

Apache Cassandra is a distributed open source database that can be referred to as a “NoSQL database” or a “wide column store.” Cassandra was originally developed at Facebook to power its “Inbox” feature and was released as an open source project in 2008. Cassandra is designed to handle “big data” workloads by distributing data, reads and writes (eventually) across multiple nodes with no single point of failure.

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How Does the Raft Consensus-Based Replication Protocol Work in YugabyteDB?

August 8, 2018

By Sid Choudhury

ACID Transactions Distributed SQL Google Spanner How It Works

How Does the Raft Consensus-Based Replication Protocol Work in YugabyteDB?

Editor’s note: This post was originally published August 8, 2018 and has been updated as of May 28, 2020.

As we saw in ”How Does Consensus-Based Replication Work in Distributed Databases?”, Raft has become the consensus replication algorithm of choice when it comes to building resilient, strongly consistent systems. YugabyteDB uses Raft for both leader election and data replication. Instead of having a single Raft group for the entire dataset in the cluster,

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August 2, 2018

By Sid Choudhury

How It Works

How Does Consensus-Based Replication Work in Distributed Databases?

Explore how consensus-based replication gets implemented in distributed databases, and dive into Paxos and Raft, the most commonly used leader-based consensus protocols

A Quick Guide to Secondary Indexes in YugabyteDB

August 1, 2018

By Karthik Ranganathan

How It Works

A Quick Guide to Secondary Indexes in YugabyteDB

YugabyteDB database has consistent, high-performance secondary indexes—built on top of distributed ACID transactions—to help retrieve data.

New to Google Cloud Databases? 5 Areas of Confusion That You Better Be Aware of

July 25, 2018

By Sid Choudhury

Google Cloud Platform Google Spanner

New to Google Cloud Databases? 5 Areas of Confusion That You Better Be Aware of

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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Implementing Distributed Transactions the Google Way: Percolator vs. Spanner

July 23, 2018

By Sid Choudhury

Google Spanner

Implementing Distributed Transactions the Google Way: Percolator vs. Spanner

In this blog, we dive deeper into Percolator and Spanner as well as the open source databases (YugabyteDB for example) that they have inspired

6 Signs You Might be Misunderstanding ACID Transactions in Distributed Databases

July 22, 2018

By Sid Choudhury

ACID Transactions How It Works

6 Signs You Might be Misunderstanding ACID Transactions in Distributed Databases

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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July 20, 2018

By Karthik Ranganathan

Community News

Yugabyte Database 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.

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.

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