Announcing YugabyteDB 2.9: Pushing the Boundaries of Relational Databases

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.