August 2021 Summaries

To connect a Spring Boot application to YugabyteDB Managed and deploy it on Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), start by creating a free YugabyteDB Managed account and database cluster, then download the Spring Boot PetClinic sample application and connect it to your YugabyteDB cluster. Next, containerize the application using Docker and tag it with your ECR repository, then push the image to your repo in ECR. Deploy the Spring Boot PetClinic sample application image to EKS by creating a CloudFormation stack, updating your `kubectl` configuration to connect to your EKS cluster, and creating a new file named `manifest-eks.yml`. Finally, create the Service and Deployment on your EKS cluster using the `kubectl create -f manifest-eks.yml` command. The PetClinic sample application should now be available at the External IP address listed in the output of the `kubectl get svc` command.

YugabyteDB 2.9 introduces several new capabilities and significant improvements that push the state of SQL forward in the world of distributed SQL, including a smart client driver for SQL that allows applications to connect directly to any node in a distributed cluster without an external load balancer, transaction savepoints for error recovery in large transactions, automatic re-sharding of data with tablet splitting, RPC compression to reduce network bandwidth consumption, and support for chunking/throttling options for secondary index backfill operations. These features aim to simplify operations, improve performance, availability, and scalability, while reducing costs associated with cross-AZ or cross-region network traffic. The release also includes several new features and improvements in database, platform, and get started sections.

Schema Versioning in YugabyteDB Using Flyway` is a blog post that explains how to manage schema changes for a distributed SQL database like YugabyteDB using the popular tool Flyway. The post covers the basics of schema versioning, introduces YugabyteDB and its compatibility with PostgreSQL, and provides step-by-step instructions on setting up a Docker container for a YugabyteDB cluster and configuring it with Flyway. It also explains how to create schema migrations in SQL and Java, and demonstrates how to run these migrations using Maven. The post highlights the benefits of using Flyway for managing schema changes, including its ability to detect and suggest manual cleanup in case of failed migrations. Overall, the post provides a comprehensive guide on how to use Flyway with YugabyteDB for effective schema management.

Distributed SQL systems, such as YugabyteDB, are being increasingly adopted for their ability to scale horizontally and handle large amounts of data. To approach multi-tenancy in a distributed SQL system, strategies like row-level security, multi-schema/multi DB, and tablegroups can be used to control access and storage requirements. Increasing the max connections for YSQL can also improve performance by scaling the cluster with additional nodes. However, row-level data recovery is not currently supported natively in YugabyteDB, but implementing a versioning scheme or using point-in-time recovery (PITR) can help address this issue. Additionally, writes in YugabyteDB only rewrite the columns that have changed, rather than rewriting the entire row.

We are excited to announce that registration is now open for the third annual Distributed SQL Summit, DSS '21, taking place on September 21-23, which will bring together industry thought leaders and practitioners to explore modern cloud native data architectures. The event will feature sessions by technology leaders from innovative organizations, including a more ambitious schedule with breakout sessions across three tracks - developer, devops, and architect - followed by hands-on workshops. Whether you're an application developer, database practitioner, or technology architect, DSS '21 offers an opportunity to meet and learn from peers and experts on topics such as building applications with distributed SQL, scaling resilient microservices globally, and future-proofing data infrastructure with a 100% open source distributed SQL database.

Sequelize is a promise-based Node.js ORM tool that enables developers to interact with databases using JavaScript instead of SQL, and it now supports YugabyteDB through the `sequelize-yugabytedb` package. YugabyteDB is a distributed SQL database for transactional applications that combines enterprise-grade relational database capabilities with horizontal scalability and resilience, making it suitable for scale-out OLTP workloads with low query latency and extreme resilience against failures. To use Sequelize with YugabyteDB, developers need to start by setting up a local cluster on their machine, create a Node.js project, install the `sequelize-yugabytedb` package, define models using the `sequelize.define()` function, and then sync the table schema and insert data into it. Once the code is executed, the results can be verified by looking at the changes inside the database.

YugabyteDB 2.6 is the latest release of the open-source database, which includes significant enhancements to its core features and self-managed DBaaS offering, Yugabyte Platform. The new version introduces point-in-time recovery (PITR), default encryption in transit, and expanded support for major public and private cloud services, including Microsoft Azure, Red Hat OpenShift, and VMware Tanzu. PITR allows admins to restore a database to a specific point in time, while TLS encryption is now enabled by default for both client-to-node and node-to-node traffic. Yugabyte Platform also offers improved high availability features, including primary/multiple-secondaries high availability for instance management. The new version includes several enterprise-grade features, such as multi-instance cloud providers, AWS GP3 volumes, and improved search usability. Additionally, the roadmap for upcoming releases includes notable features like point-in-time recovery, incremental backups, and better support for online schema migrations.