February 2020 Summaries

### YugabyteDB 2.1 General Availability YugabyteDB 2.1 has reached general availability with almost 70 new enhancements and fixes. The release builds on the scalable and fault-tolerant design inspired by Google Spanner, offering an open-source, high-performance distributed SQL database. Key features include geo-distributed, multi-cloud clusters, two data center deployments for reducing cross-DC write latency, read replicas for reducing cross-DC read latency, performance improvements in Yugabyte SQL, enterprise-grade security enhancements, and beta features such as Yugabyte Cloud as a fully-managed DBaaS, colocated tables for reducing JOIN latency, yugabyted for simplifying getting started UX, Change Data Capture (CDC) for streaming data out to external systems, new & improved ecosystem integrations, and more.

YugabyteDB is an open-source, high-performance distributed SQL database built on a scalable and fault-tolerant design inspired by Google Spanner. YugabyteDB Managed is a fully-managed "YugabyteDB-as-a-Service" that allows users to run clusters on either Amazon Web Services or Google Cloud Platform, offering a free tier with 3 nodes, 5 GB of storage, high availability, and management UI. To get started, users create an account, provision a cluster, download YugabyteDB clients, connect to the cloud-based cluster using administrative credentials, create a sample database, build objects, load data, and connect to the cluster with an administrative tool like DataGrip. With its PostgreSQL wire-compatible SQL API and support for various tools and platforms, YugabyteDB is suitable for developing applications with distributed SQL capabilities.

YugabyteDB 2.1 has achieved a 10x performance improvement over the previous release, with optimizations including batch loading data using COPY FROM, parallel execution for full scans and aggregates, index scan improvements, single row update with fine-grained locking, caching checked foreign keys inside transactions, pushing down aggregate functions such as MAX(), and various other enhancements. These optimizations are primarily driven by reducing RPC calls and data transfer over the network, leveraging the reuse of PostgreSQL libraries at both the YSQL query layer and the distributed storage layer called DocDB. YugabyteDB has also shown improved performance in benchmarking results for the Yahoo! Cloud Serving Benchmark (YCSB) and the TPC-C benchmark, with significant gains in throughput and latency across various workloads. The database's geo-distributed design allows it to take network latency into consideration when computing costs, enabling cost-based optimization of queries. With ongoing work on further enhancements such as pushing down entire execution subtrees into DocDB and optimizing GROUP BY queries with pushdowns, YugabyteDB continues to improve its performance and scalability capabilities.

YugabyteDB 2.1 is now generally available, offering significant performance improvements, geo-distributed deployment scenarios, and enterprise-grade security enhancements. The new release features a 10x increase in Yugabyte SQL performance, production-ready multi-cloud clusters, and enhanced data encryption and key management capabilities. Additionally, Yugabyte Cloud, a fully-managed pay-as-you-go cloud service, is now available, along with colocated tables for reducing JOIN latency and yugabyted for simplifying getting started UX. Change Data Capture, distributed transactional backups, and deep ecosystem integrations are also new or improved features in the 2.1 release. The YugabyteDB community has experienced phenomenal growth over the last two years, and the project continues to attract developers and organizations looking for a cloud-native, distributed SQL database solution.

DataGrip from JetBrains is a well-rounded visual database tool that supports almost 20 SQL and NoSQL databases from a single interface, making it easy to work with distributed SQL databases like YugabyteDB. DataGrip boasts many features including support for multiple databases, database objects, database editor, navigation, writing SQL, and additional features such as query console, diff viewer, import/export wizards, VCS, and ER diagramming capabilities. To get started with DataGrip on a distributed SQL database, users need to install a local YugabyteDB cluster, download and extract the YugabyteDB software, configure loopback addresses, create a 3-node cluster, download and install DataGrip, connect to the YugabyteDB cluster, create the Northwind database, load data into it, and test drive DataGrip against the YugabyteDB cluster.

YugabyteDB provides various tips and tricks for distributed SQL, including guidance on using JSON vs JSONB data types, indexing JSON fields, limiting query timeouts, and distributing shard leaders across nodes. The database also supports expression indexes for indexed JSON fields, allowing clients to quickly find specific rows. Additionally, YugabyteDB offers features such as a default leader region for performance reasons, distributed tablet leadership, and support for various workloads like TPC-C, YCSB, and Jepsen testing. The database is compatible with PostgreSQL and provides a Postgres-compatible API, making it suitable for developers who are already familiar with the technology.

In this summary, we'll cover the key points without using lists or code. Developing reactive microservices with Spring Data and Distributed SQL is gaining popularity due to performance gains from reactive streams. Spring WebFlux MVC has gained wide adoption in cloud-native applications for high throughput and low latency microservices. A shift towards the reactive programming model has occurred, with many database providers supporting reactive drivers that replace traditional blocking database calls with async and non-blocking data access. The tutorial will walk through building a Spring microservice using Spring WebFlux, Spring Data Reactive Repositories, and YugabyteDB, which supports reactive drivers for CRUD operations. YugabyteDB is an open-source, high-performance distributed SQL database built on a scalable and fault-tolerant design inspired by Google Spanner. The technology stack includes Spring WebFlux, Spring Data reactive for Apache Cassandra, and Yugabyte Cloud Query Language (YCQL). By following the tutorial, developers will build a Spring microservices application exposing a reactive REST API for performing CRUD operations against YugabyteDB, leveraging reactive repositories, and reactive data access. This results in highly scalable and performant applications with a non-blocking programming model.

In a distributed SQL database, the primary key and business-unique key are two distinct concepts that serve different purposes. A surrogate primary key is a synthetic value with no meaning in the business world, generated behind the scenes automatically using an explicit or implicit trigger-based scheme. This approach is recommended for distributed databases due to the larger row counts and potential for performance issues when changing primary keys. YugabyteDB uses a pseudo-random generator, such as `gen_random_uuid()`, to populate surrogate primary key columns, which are faster than traditional identity-based sequences. The recommended approach is to specify a surrogate primary key for every table, identify at least one business-unique key, and create a not null, unique constraint on it. Using the `default gen_random_uuid()` function or an alternative pseudo-random UUID generator function can be used to populate the surrogate primary key column declaratively. This approach provides an insurance policy against the costly consequences of changing natural primary keys in distributed databases.

** This week's tips and tricks blog from YugabyteDB recap some distributed SQL questions from around the Internet, review upcoming events, new documentation, blogs that have been published since the last post, and provide answers to frequently asked questions. The blog covers various topics such as getting JSON output of distinct columns, issuing a query that ranks items based on total sales, using TRUNCATE and DELETE statements, updating records with selective character replacement, and more. Additionally, it highlights new documentation, blogs, tutorials, and videos, upcoming meetups and conferences, and job openings at YugabyteDB. The blog aims to provide helpful information and resources for developers working with distributed SQL databases like YugabyteDB.

YugabyteDB is a distributed SQL database that offers strong consistency, continuous availability, and long-term data persistence as fundamental design principles. It leverages an in-memory block cache for good read performance, even when the dataset doesn't fit entirely in RAM. YugabyteDB supports multi-region deployment options, including synchronous replication across data centers with automatic resilience against data center failures. The YSQL API adheres to PostgreSQL's error codes in most cases, but returns YugabyteDB-specific error codes for system-specific errors. YugabyteDB auto-recovery from failures is typically within a few seconds, depending on the heartbeat interval set by the user. To view tables in JetBrains DataGrip, users need to enable standard JDBC metadata instead of PostgreSQL-specific metadata. Additionally, new documentation, blogs, tutorials, and videos have been published, including updates on yb-ts-cli, server-server encryption, and upcoming meetups and conferences.