Thoughts on distributed databases, open source, and cloud native
Editor’s note – This is the first part of a two-part series on database storage engines:
When evaluating operational databases,
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Read MoreIn the first post of this two-part series, we learned about the B-tree vs LSM approach to index management in operational databases. While the indexing algorithm plays a fundamental role in determining the type of storage engine needed, advanced considerations highlighted below are equally important to take into account.
Monolithic databases,
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Read MoreResults from the 2018 Kubernetes Application Usage Survey should put to rest concerns enterprise users have had around the viability of Docker containers and Kubernetes orchestration for running stateful services such as databases and message queues. Its exciting to see that nearly 40% of respondents are running databases (SQL and/or NoSQL) using Kubernetes.
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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 databases, distributed NoSQL/non-relational databases 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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Read MoreA few of our early users have chosen to build their new cloud applications on YugabyteDB even though their current primary datastore is MongoDB. Starting with the v3.4 release in Nov 2016, MongoDB has made improvements in its sharding and replication architecture that has allowed it to be re-classified as a Consistent and Partition-tolerant (CP) database and move away from its Available and Partition-tolerant (AP) origins.
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Updated April 2019.
The famed CAP Theorem has been a source of much debate among distributed systems engineers. Those of us building distributed databases are often asked how we deal with it. In this post, we dive deeper into the consistency-availability tradeoff imposed by CAP which is only applicable during failure conditions.
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Read MoreIn an earlier blog on database consistency, we had a detailed discussion on the risks and challenges applications face in dealing with eventually consistent NoSQL databases. We also dispelled the myth that eventually consistent DBs perform better than strongly consistent DBs. In this blog, we will look more closely into how YugaByte DB provides strong consistency while outperforming an eventually consistent DB like Apache Cassandra.
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Read MoreUpdated March 2019.
Ever wondered which database Facebook (FB) uses to store the profiles of its 2.3B+ users? Is it SQL or NoSQL? How has FB database architecture evolved over the last 15+ years? As an engineer in FB database infrastructure team from 2007 to 2013, I had a front row seat in witnessing this evolution.
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Read MoreCame across the image below here and this made me smile. Not because of the implied complexity of choosing a database, but the reality with which this flow chart captures the state of the database world today in 2017. Of course, running whatever database you end up choosing in production is a whole another order of complexity.
I have been working on distributed systems for the last 10+ years.
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