YugaByte DB

The Distributed SQL Blog

Thoughts on distributed databases, open source, and cloud native

ACID Transactions CockroachDB Distributed SQL Google Cloud Platform Google Spanner
July 23, 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 How It Works
July 22, 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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YugaByte Database Community & Engineering Update — July 20, 2018

Welcome to the inaugural edition of the YugaByte DB Community and Engineering update series! Let’s dive in and take a look at what has happened over the last few weeks.

Community News

There has been a lot of activity in terms of meetups and events. In June, YugaByte was at DockerCon. We also did a hands-on lab about building geo-distributed cloud apps at a Datariders meetup and a talk at Samsung about building modern apps at cloud scale.

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Community News Release Announcements
July 20, 2018
by Karthik Ranganathan
ACID Transactions Databases Distributed SQL How It Works
July 19, 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 have made a strong comeback in the last several years with the launch of next-generation distributed databases that have built-in support for them.

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How DynamoDB’s Pricing Works, Gets Expensive Quickly and the Best Alternatives

DynamoDB is AWS’s NoSQL alternative to Cassandra, primarily marketed to mid-sized and large enterprises. The uses cases best suited for DynamoDB include those that require a flexible data model, reliable performance, and the automatic scaling of throughput capacity. DynamoDB’s landing page points out that mobile, web, gaming, ad tech, and IoT are all good application types for DynamoDB.

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Amazon DynamoDB Amazon Web Services
July 18, 2018
by Jimmy Guerrero

11 Things You Wish You Knew Before Starting with DynamoDB

DynamoDB is a fully managed NoSQL database offered by Amazon Web Services. While it works great for smaller scale applications, the limitations it poses in the context of larger scale applications are not well understood. This post aims to help developers and operations engineers understand the precise strengths and weaknesses of DynamoDB, especially when it powers a complex large-scale application.

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Amazon DynamoDB Amazon Web Services
July 10, 2018
by Karthik Ranganathan

DynamoDB vs MongoDB vs Cassandra for Fast Growing Geo-Distributed Apps

Amazon DynamoDB is a popular NoSQL database choice for mid-to-large enterprises. In this post, we look beyond Amazon’s marketing claims to explore how well DynamoDB satisfies the core technical requirements of fast growing geo-distributed apps with low latency reads, a common use case found in today’s enterprises. We examine the development, operational and financial consequences of working around the limitations of DynamoDB when attempting to “force-fit” for this use case.

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Amazon DynamoDB Apache Cassandra MongoDB
July 10, 2018
by Karthik Ranganathan
Databases Distributed SQL How It Works
June 28, 2018
by Sid Choudhury

A Busy Developer’s Guide to Database Storage Engines — Advanced Topics

In 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.

Consistency, Transactions & Concurrency Control

Monolithic databases,

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