May 2021 Summaries

Increasing the failure threshold in YugabyteDB allows for more time to be given to a node to come back online, reducing downtime and improving high availability. The default threshold is set at 15 minutes, but this can be adjusted to accommodate environments with large data densities or other specific requirements. This involves changing two settings: follower_unavailable_considered_failed_sec and log_min_seconds_to_retain, which need to be set to the same value to achieve the desired outcome. With careful consideration of potential risks and monitoring disk utilization, increasing the threshold can provide significant benefits in terms of reducing downtime and improving overall system resilience.

I joined Yugabyte as a DocDB software engineer in March and have been extremely happy with the decision, drawn to its positioning in a growing market as a marquee player in the distributed SQL space, embracing OLTP workloads at its core and being cloud-agnostic. I'm also motivated by challenging systems problems like concurrency, consistency, and durability at scale, impressed by Yugabyte's solutions to those problems using mature open-source software such as Postgres and RocksDB. The company's global database and global team, with a culture of collaboration and flexibility, have been a perfect fit for me, allowing me to work remotely while maintaining my life in New England.

Falarica, a multi-cloud, fully managed SQL analytics platform, has partnered with Yugabyte to build great data products together. The founding team of Falarica had the vision of creating a powerful SQL analytics platform that can run on all clouds, including private on-prem data centers. They evaluated several transactional databases, including YugabyteDB, CockroachDB, and MongoDB, before deciding to partner with Yugabyte due to its out-of-the-box cross-site replication capabilities, multi-cloud deployment options, and PostgreSQL compatibility. Falarica's vision of a multi-cloud solution for analytics complements Yugabyte's multi-site transactional story, and the two companies are now working together to provide a comprehensive end-to-end solution to users. The partnership has resulted in remarkable community growth, new customer wins, and regular feature additions to Yugabyte Cloud.

Here's a 1-paragraph summary of the provided text, highlighting key points about distributed SQL tips and tricks for YugabyteDB: YugabyteDB provides several features and considerations for users deploying their clusters on cloud platforms, including setting up firewall rules to enable internode RPC communication and compaction processes that don't require vacuuming like PostgreSQL. The database also offers a multi-API approach with YSQL and YCQL, allowing developers to choose the best API for their workload needs. Additionally, YugabyteDB's documentation has been updated with new content, and users can explore features through the quickstart page or by participating in community discussions on Slack or the Forum.

Dhaval Jagani from Infosys presented "The Future of Databases" at the Distributed SQL Summit Asia 2021, exploring data trends and demands such as highly available and resilient applications, event-driven architectures, and generating insights with AI and machine learning. He argues that distributed databases are ideal for these demands due to their ability to store multiple copies of data, manage node failures without downtime, and support multiple APIs and data models. Dhaval also believes that SQL will continue to be dominant in the future, particularly with distributed SQL databases that provide massive parallel processing, automatic sharding, and secondary indexes. Organizations are shifting away from polyglot persistence towards "data platforms" which reduce database sprawl and enable multiple use cases and workloads with fewer databases and more functionality.

YugabyteDB has made significant progress in 2021, with exciting announcements such as the launch of Yugabyte University, a successful Distributed SQL Summit Asia event, and a $48M round of funding to accelerate distributed SQL activities. The open-source community has been instrumental in driving growth, with over 660,000 distributed SQL clusters deployed, 3,300+ community Slack members, and 2,200+ students enrolled in courses. The community has also contributed to the development of YugabyteDB, with 188 contributors on GitHub and a growing number of users who have spotted the Easter egg hidden in plain sight in the admin UI. Additionally, YugabyteDB continues to host virtual events, including the Distributed SQL Summit Asia, and offers free online courses on Udemy. The company is also hiring across all roles in all regions, with over 30 open jobs currently available.

YugabyteDB 2.7 offers a comprehensive set of features to support the deployment and management of distributed SQL databases on Kubernetes environments, enabling developers to build scalable microservices that deliver new customer experiences, improve operations, and drive innovation. The latest release provides fine-grained control over data placement using YSQL tablespaces, enables point-in-time recovery, supports encryption in transit, and integrates with Apache Kafka for IoT and streaming applications. YugabyteDB 2.7 also enables DevOps teams to deploy and manage database clusters across multiple clouds, regions, and Kubernetes environments with high availability and reliability. With the release of Yugabyte Platform, customers can confidently deploy and run their microservices and database clusters on VMware Tanzu across any cloud without lock-in, simplifying infrastructure and database operations.