YugaByte DB

The YugaByte Database Blog

Thoughts on open source, cloud native and distributed databases

Jepsen Testing on YugaByte DB

At YugaByte, our mission is to build a robust, reliable, distributed OLTP database. Needless to say, we take correctness and technical accuracy of our claims very seriously. Therefore, we absolutely love a testing framework like Jepsen which helps verify correctness and are fans of Kyle Kingsbury’s work!

Here is a summary of what we have done so far in regards to Jepsen:

  • We have performed our own DIY style Jepsen testing
  • The YugaByte DB Jepsen testing repository is open source
  • For the current suite of Jepsen tests for YugaByte DB that we have tested in a loop,

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ACID Transactions How It Works
September 17, 2018
by Karthik Ranganathan

How Does the Raft Consensus-Based Replication Protocol Work in YugaByte DB?

As we saw in ”How Does Consensus-Based Replication Work in Distributed Databases?”, Raft has become the consensus replication algorithm of choice when it comes to building resilient, strongly consistent systems. The YugaByte DB database uses Raft for both leader election and data replication. Instead of having a single Raft group for the entire dataset in the cluster,

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ACID Transactions How It Works
August 8, 2018
by Sid Choudhury

Implementing Distributed Transactions the Google Way: Percolator vs. Spanner

Our post 6 Signs You Might be Misunderstanding ACID Transactions in Distributed Databases describes the key challenges involved in building high performance distributed transactions. Multiple open source ACID-compliant distributed databases have started building such transactions by taking inspiration from research papers published by Google. In this post, we dive deeper into Percolator and Spanner, the two Google systems behind those papers,

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ACID Transactions CockroachDB Google Cloud Platform Google Cloud Spanner
July 23, 2018
by Sid Choudhury

6 Signs You Might be Misunderstanding ACID Transactions in Distributed Databases

As described in A Primer on ACID Transactions, first generation NoSQL databases dropped ACID guarantees with the rationale that such guarantees are needed only by old school enterprises running monolithic, relational applications in a single private datacenter. And the premise was that modern distributed apps should instead focus on linear database scalability along with low latency, mostly-accurate,

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ACID Transactions How It Works
July 22, 2018
by Sid Choudhury

A Primer on ACID Transactions: The Basics Every Cloud App Developer Must Know

ACID transactions were a big deal when first introduced formally in the 1980s in monolithic SQL databases such as Oracle and IBM DB2. Popular distributed NoSQL databases of the past decade including Amazon DynamoDB and Apache Cassandra initially focused on “big data” use cases that did not require such guarantees and hence avoided implementing them altogether. However, ACID transactions are making a strong comeback in the last 2 years with the launch of next-generation distributed databases that have built-in support for them.

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ACID Transactions How It Works
July 19, 2018
by Sid Choudhury

Polyglot Persistence vs. Multi-API/Multi-Model: Which One For Multi-Cloud?

Modern app architectures rely on data with different models and access patterns. Polyglot persistence, first introduced in 2011, states that each such data model should be powered by an independent database that is purpose-built for that model. The original intent was to look beyond relational/SQL databases to the emerging world of NoSQL.


Polyglot Persistence in Action at an E-Commerce App (Source: Martin Fowler)

The Messy Reality of Polyglot Persistence

Polyglot persistence is not free of costs — it leads to increased complexity across the board.

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ACID Transactions Amazon DynamoDB Amazon Web Services Azure Cosmos DB Cassandra How It Works
June 29, 2018
by Sid Choudhury

Yes We Can! Distributed ACID Transactions with High Performance

ACID transactions are a fundamental building block when developing business-critical, user-facing applications. They simplify the complex task of ensuring data integrity while supporting highly concurrent operations. While they are taken for granted in monolithic SQL/relational DBs, distributed NoSQL/non-relational DBs either forsake them completely or support only a highly restrictive single-row flavor (see sections below). This loss of ACID properties is usually justified with a gain in performance (measured in terms of low latency and/or high throughput).

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ACID Transactions How It Works How-To Performance & Benchmarks
April 24, 2018
by Karthik Ranganathan

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