YSQL Development Intermediate Training Recap – April 22, 2021

VP Developer Relations

April 23, 2021

Yesterday we delivered our free “YSQL Development Intermediate” community training and certification class. If you weren’t able to make it, here’s what you missed…

Course Content

In this 90 min training aimed at beginner and intermediate SQL developers, we covered the following topics:

YugabyteDB review and setup
Constraints
UDFs, expressions, and operators
Indexes
Views
Triggers
Extensions

We worked through over 40 exercises that showed how developers can immediately leverage their PostgreSQL knowledge and apply it to YugabyteDB. Check out this post to learn more about how YugabyteDB achieves PostgreSQL compatibility: “Why We Built YugabyteDB by Reusing the PostgreSQL Query Layer”

Missed the Training and Certification Exam?

If you missed the YSQL Development Fundamentals Training, no problem. Join us on the YugabyteDB Community Slack and tag me: @Jimmy G (YB) in the #training channel and I’ll get you set up with everything you need.

If you are brand new to distributed SQL and want to start with the basics, check out the “YugabyteDB Fundamentals” course and certification exam. You can take the course online on Udemy and take the certification exam afterwards.

To see all of the training opportunities offered, visit the Yugabyte Events page and filter by “training”.

Certification Results

Congratulations to Suhendra Ahmad for being the first community member to pass the exam with a near perfect score. Well done!

YugabyteDB YSQL Development Intermediate Training Certification Results

On a scale of 1 to 5, with 1 being easy and 5 being very difficult, the average response rated the exam a solid 3. This tells us it was a moderately challenging exam for many folks, so some careful studying is required in order to pass. We did, however, provide all attendees with a study guide to make the preparation for the exam a lot easier. Good luck to those who are gearing up to take the exam in the coming days.

Questions and Answers

We had quite a few questions pop up during and after the training. I wasn’t able to get to all the questions in real time, so I wanted to recap a few of them in this blog post.

Is it possible to migrate from IBM DB2 to YugabyteDB?

Yes. In fact we helped a large financial services company move their workloads from IBM DB2 to YugabyteDB. You can learn more by reading, “Fortune 500 Financial Services Company Chooses YugabyteDB to Support Microservices and Mainframe Migration Initiatives.”

Are all PostgreSQL ALTER operations supported in YugabyteDB?

Many ALTER operations are currently supported. The remaining ones in development can be tracked in GitHub issue #1124.

Can I fine tune YugabyteDB’s default sharding strategy?

Yes. Based on your use case you may want to weigh the options between HASH and RANGE-based harding. For more details, check out the data sharding section of the Docs.

Does YugabyteDB support PREPARE statements with bind variables?

Yes. You read more about YugabyteDB’s support for PREPARE statements in the Docs.

Can I split indexes into multiple tablets and when should I consider it?

For hash-sharded indexes, you can use the SPLIT INTO clause to specify the number of tablets to be created for the index. The hash range is then evenly split across those tablets. Presplitting indexes, using SPLIT INTO, distributes index workloads on a production cluster. For example, if you have 3 servers, splitting the index into 30 tablets can provide higher write throughput on the index. To learn more about how to make use of SPLIT INTO check out the Docs.

What if I accidentally drop the database? Is there any possibility that I can recover it?

Assuming you have backups but want a recent version of the database, your best bet is going to be to make use of Yugabyte 2.7’s upcoming Point-in-Time-Recovery feature. The point-in-time restore feature allows you to restore the state of your cluster’s data from a specific point in time. This can be relative, such as “three hours ago”, or an absolute timestamp. You can learn more about PITR in the Docs.