Announcing YugaByte DB 1.2 and Company Update

Published in

The Distributed SQL Blog

6 min readMar 13, 2019

The team at YugaByte is excited to announce that YugaByte DB 1.2 is officially GA! You can download the latest version from our Quick Start page.

New in 1.2: YugaByte SQL Beta 3

YugaByte SQL (YSQL) is our PostgreSQL v11 compatible, distributed SQL API. It is ideal for powering microservices that require low latency, internet scale, geographic data distribution and extreme resilience to failures. At the core of YSQL lies DocDB, YugaByte DB’s massively scalable, transactional document store inspired by Google Spanner. Unlike other distributed SQL projects, YSQL does not re-implement the SQL dialect of PostgreSQL in a new programming language. Instead, we’ve reused PostgreSQL’s C code to ensure maximum compatibility, easy upgrades, and to avoid a costly programming language switch from say Go to C in the critical I/O path. This latest Beta 3 release marks the most important milestone to date in our SQL journey that started with Beta 1 in May 2018 followed by Beta 2 in September 2018.

*From Monolithic PostgreSQL to Distributed SQL*

Here’s a select list of cluster-aware SQL features now available in YugaByte DB:

DDL statements: CREATE, DROP and TRUNCATE tables
Data types: All primitive types including numeric types (integers and floats), text data types, byte arrays, date-time types, UUID, SERIAL, as well as JSONB
DML statements: Most statements such as INSERT, UPDATE, SELECT and DELETE. Bulk of core SQL functionality now supported includes JOINs, WHERE clauses, GROUP BY, ORDER BY, LIMIT, OFFSET and SEQUENCES
Transactions: ABORT, ROLLBACK, BEGIN, END, and COMMIT
Expressions: Built-in functions and operators
Other Features: VIEWs, EXPLAIN, PREPARE-BIND-EXECUTE, and JDBC Support

For the complete list of supported features, check out the to the YSQL API docs.

As we drive towards YSQL GA in this Summer’s 2.0 release, look for some of the remaining SQL features to show up in the YugaByte DB GitHub repo in the coming weeks, including:

Serializable Isolation
Foreign Keys
UDFs
Certifications with popular ORM frameworks including Spring Boot, Sequelize, SQLAlchemy and more.

What about support for GIS (geospatial queries) and stored procedures? They are on the roadmap and look for them to be supported in one of the post 2.0 releases.

What about performance? We are in the middle of running comprehensive benchmarks for YSQL and YCQL, as well as, the latest versions of competing databases. There will be lots of exciting news to report on the performance and benchmarking front in the coming weeks, so please stay tuned!

New in 1.2: Streamlined Kubernetes Experience

Many of our users run YugaByte DB natively in Kubernetes for business-critical use cases, including running a private Database-as-a-Service (DBaaS). These users have put YugaByte DB on Kubernetes though the ringer by verifying correctness and availability not only during various failure scenarios, but also while performing various Day 2 operations such as rolling upgrades, security patching of underlying nodes and backup/restores.

To make it easy to deploy and run YugaByte DB as a StatefulSet, we have released a comprehensive Helm Chart.

With this Helm Chart, you can now create a YugaByte DB cluster in Kubernetes using just a few simple steps. You can also customize various parameters such as the replication factor, the total resources allocated to a pod (CPU, memory, number of disks and the size of disks) and the number of pods, and more!

Update on Jepsen Testing

At YugaByte, our mission is to build a robust, reliable distributed database and we are big believers in testing frameworks such as Jepsen that help verify the correctness of distributed systems. You can track our current Jepsen testing efforts on this YugaByte DB project page on GitHub. Look for an exciting announcement in this space in the coming weeks!

CockroachDB Benchmarks

In case you missed it, last month we published an in-depth YugaByte DB vs CockroachDB comparison that looked at performance benchmarks, plus architecture and design differences.

In a nutshell, YugaByte DB delivers an average of 3.5x higher throughput and 3x lower latency compared to CockroachDB. Here are some selected highlights from the large scale, transactional workloads we ran:

5x more insert throughput, 9x faster
4x more query throughput, 3x faster
4x more distributed transactions throughput

YugaByte DB offers additional features such as read replicas (for timeline-consistent, low-latency reads from the local region) and automatic data expiry (by setting a TTL at table level or row level) which you won’t find in CockroachDB.

You can download the in-depth comparison here or watch the webinar playback here.

New Customer Wins

We are excited to announce Plume and Ink Aviation as YugaByte’s newest customers!

Use Cases: Internet of Things, Smart Devices, AI

Plume’s intelligent, AI-driven platform enables a rich set of modern consumer services for the home that can run on third-party hardware platforms and be deployed at massive scale. Plume is the pioneer of Adaptive WiFi, the world’s first self-optimizing Wi-Fi delivering a reliable and consistent internet experience to every corner of the home through the invention of Wi-Fi Pods and SuperPods. The Plume Cloud enables the most advanced and resilient home Wi-Fi solution because of its ability to dynamically adapt and respond to changing network conditions. An open-source common software, OpenSync can be integrated into third-party hardware for connection to the Plume Cloud.

Use Case: Traveler Experiences

Ink Aviation provides smart, simple and effective systems for the aviation industry that improve the passenger experience while reducing operating costs. Products and services include mobile passenger handling, departure control systems, web and mobile check-in, plus bag drop kiosks

New Case Studies

Two new case studies are now available for download from the website.

Industry: Retail & E-Commerce
Use Case: Internet-Scale Microservices

Narvar helps retailers like Nordstrom, The Home Depot and Old Navy champion their customers at every step of their journey. Learn how YugaByte DB helped Narvar reduce costs, avoid AWS lock-in and maintain GDPR compliance.

Download the case study.

Industry: Logistics and Supply Chain
Use Case: Internet of Things

Turvo is a collaborative IoT platform changing the game in logistics whose team includes the founders of Uber Freight. Learn how YugaByte DB helped Turvo reduce costs, simplify operations and increase developer agility while achieving Internet scale with low latencies.

Download the case study.

Join Us at PostgresConf 2019!

For those you attending PostgresConf 2019 in NYC next week, make sure to stop by our booth to pick up some swag, catch a demo and chat with us about all things PostgreSQL and distributed SQL. Also, make sure to check out the YugaByte DB talks happening at this year’s conference:

March 20: “The What and the How of Making PostgreSQL GDPR Compliant”

and

March 21: “High Performance Multi-Region PostgreSQL Using a Distributed Data Storage Engine”

We are Hiring!

Current open positions in Sunnyvale, CA include:

Our team consists of domain experts from leading software companies such as Facebook, Oracle, Nutanix, Google and LinkedIn. We have come a long way in a short time but we cannot rest on our past accomplishments. We need your ideas and skills to make us better at every function. Together, we will create the next great software company. All while having tons of fun and blazing new trails!

What’s Next?

Get started with YugaByte DB on the cloud or container of your choice.
Compare YugaByte DB to databases like Google Cloud Spanner, CockroachDB, MongoDB and DynamoDB.
Contact us to learn more about licensing, pricing or to schedule a technical overview.

Originally published at blog.yugabyte.com on March 13, 2019.