April 2020 Summaries

YugabyteDB has successfully reused PostgreSQL's native query layer to build its own distributed SQL database, resulting in several key benefits including extreme resilience against failures with native failover/repair, ability to scale writes on-demand through auto sharding/rebalancing, and lower user latency through geographic data distribution. By reusing the PostgreSQL codebase, YugabyteDB can leverage advanced RDBMS features that are well-designed and documented, supporting a wide range of features such as expression-based indexes, partial indexes, table functions, stored procedures, triggers, user-defined types, temporary tables, row level security, column level privileges, and PostgreSQL extensions. Additionally, YugabyteDB's reuse approach enables the database to maintain high quality through robust regression testing and adherence to the PostgreSQL specification, allowing it to integrate seamlessly with ecosystem tools and frameworks, providing a developer and operations engineering experience similar to Amazon Aurora while remaining fully compatible with PostgreSQL.

Spanner, a Google-managed relational database service, has been the gold standard for powering globally-distributed and/or horizontally-scalable relational apps. However, users interested in adopting Spanner have to weigh the benefits of a fully-managed service with the proprietary and expensive nature of the service. YugabyteDB, an open-source geo-distributed SQL database inspired by Google Spanner's architecture, offers a cost-effective alternative that can be deployed on any cloud platform, including managed services like Google Cloud Kubernetes Engine (GKE). Deploying YugabyteDB on GKE strikes a balance between managing infrastructure and using an open cloud-native SQL database. While multi-region deployments of YugabyteDB require additional considerations due to Kubernetes' underlying architecture, a global DNS service can be used to connect multiple GKE clusters, making it easy to run a globally-consistent YugabyteDB cluster across different regions.

VMware Tanzu provides a managed Kubernetes environment for deploying modern applications, and has been certified with YugabyteDB, allowing developers to easily scale relational SQL workloads in cloud-native microservices applications. The joint solution also benefits operations teams by providing a cloud-native database that runs on the same platform as other stateless application services, making it easy to manage and deploy. To get started with YugabyteDB on Tanzu Kubernetes, users can follow a series of steps including installing the Helm chart, creating service accounts, updating the container repository, and deploying the cluster. The resulting YugabyteDB cluster provides a highly available distributed SQL database that can be easily managed and scaled using Kubernetes tools.

YugabyteDB has released version 2.1.3, which includes over 60 new enhancements and fixes. The team has been working remotely due to the COVID-19 pandemic and is continuing to meet with customers and partners online. This release builds on the scalable and fault-tolerant design inspired by Google Spanner, providing a high-performance distributed SQL database. YugabyteDB's SQL API is PostgreSQL wire compatible, offering parallel queries across tablets for SELECT COUNT|MIN|MAX|SUM (*|col_id) FROM, improved error reporting, and transaction aware snapshot persistence. The release also includes new features and fixes for the YCQL API and Yugabyte Platform. Additionally, Yugabyte is hiring for various positions to continue its growth and momentum.

Yugabyte is currently hiring for various open positions in their Product, Customer Success, Engineering, and Marketing teams, with a focus on health and safety amid the COVID-19 pandemic. The company is holding virtual interviews to ensure social distancing and containment efforts are maintained. Additionally, they have found openings within the broader Yugabyte community through online searches, offering opportunities for those interested in distributed systems, data science, and more. With the current situation in mind, the company aims to bring a bit of positivity by sharing these job openings.

YugabyteDB provides several ways to save the results of YSQL commands to a file, including using the \o filename command. To specify multiple hosts for the YSQL client to use, the client can be configured with a list of hostnames or IP addresses in the connection settings. The yb-ctl command is used to create and manage YugabyteDB clusters on a single local machine, but it cannot be used to monitor or manage multi-node clusters created using manual deployment methods. To extract a date from a timestamp using YSQL, the `login_time::date` cast function can be used. Additionally, YSQL provides an equivalent to MySQL's group_concat function called string_agg, which can be used to concatenate non-NULL values from a group. The latest blog posts, tutorials, and videos are available on the YugabyteDB website, including articles on automating deployments with Google Cloud Deployment Manager and getting started with distributed SQL colocated tables.

Automating YugabyteDB Deployments with Google Cloud Deployment Manager` is a guide that demonstrates how to deploy and manage a YugabyteDB database on Google Cloud using Cloud Deployment Manager templates. The deployment process involves creating a YAML configuration file, setting up the base region for the nodes, specifying firewall rules, and configuring instance settings. The guide provides step-by-step instructions, including prerequisites, custom environment steps, and a conclusion, to help users automate their YugabyteDB deployments on Google Cloud. The use of zone-aware replication in YugabyteDB allows for redundancy across multiple fault domains, ensuring high availability and scalability. By following this guide, users can easily deploy and manage their YugabyteDB databases on Google Cloud, making it an ideal choice for cloud-native application development.