YugabyteDB Engineering Update – May 29, 2019

We are pleased to announce that YugabyteDB 1.2.9 is live and available for download! You can read the release notes of this and previous versions here. This release is shipping with 20+ new features, enhancements and bug fixes. Here’s a few highlights from the 1.2.9 release:

YSQL Updates

What’s YSQL? It’s YugabyteDB’s PostgreSQL-compatible, distributed SQL API.

• [#725] – DEFAULT VALUES, OVERRIDING and ON CONFLICT and now supported as optional INSERT clauses. With DEFAULT VALUES, when a new row is created and no values are specified for some of the columns, those columns will be filled with the assigned default values. OVERRIDING can be useful when copying values between tables and want to override any restrictions on a specific column.
• [#1332] – The COMMENT ON statement is now supported. COMMENT ON is used to store a comment about a database object. Comments can be viewed using PostgreSQL’s \d family of commands.
• [#1310] – Support for the CREATE and DROP DOMAIN commands has been added. A domain is a data type with optional constraints e.g., NOT NULL, CHECK, etc. Domains are useful for centralizing the management of fields with common constraints. For example, some tables might contain the text columns that require a CHECK constraint to ensure that values are not null and that they also do not contain a space.

System, Usability and Deployment Improvements

• [#950] – With this issue we implemented RPC heartbeats which allowed us to deliver sub 5 second failovers after a network partition. You can read more details about this fix in the blog, “Achieving Fast Failovers After Network Partitions in a Distributed SQL Database.”

Community Shoutouts

Thanks to @aegershman, @dodlip, @swayamraina, @hiqbn, @jinfengnarvar, and @lokeshlal for logging issues and enhancement requests.

New Documentation, Blogs, Tutorials, and Videos

• How to Handle Runaway Queries in a Distributed SQL Database
• 5 Reasons Why Apache Kafka Needs a Distributed SQL Database
• Develop IoT Apps with Confluent Kafka, KSQL, Spring Boot & Distributed SQL
• Achieving Fast Failovers After Network Partitions in a Distributed SQL Database
• My Experience as a YugabyteDB Engineering Intern

We are Hiring!

What’s Next?

• Compare YugabyteDB in depth to databases like CockroachDB, Google Cloud Spanner and MongoDB.
• Get started with YugabyteDB on macOS, Linux, Docker, and Kubernetes.
• Contact us to learn more about licensing, pricing, or to schedule a technical overview.