YugabyteDB Evolves PostgreSQL to a Distributed Architecture for Modern, Cloud-Native Applications

Adaptive Cost-Based Optimizer and Smart Data Distribution lead key new features of enhanced YugabyteDB architecture

SUNNYVALE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Yugabyte today unveiled significant architectural enhancements to its flagship database, YugabyteDB, with powerful new features that fully evolve PostgreSQL to a distributed database for modern applications. These new capabilities — collectively called enhanced Postgres compatibility — enable a broader range of Postgres apps to run on YugabyteDB, making it the perfect database for companies building cloud-native applications and modernizing existing applications to a cloud-native RDBMS.

PostgreSQL remains the most popular database among developers due to its mature feature set, powerful extensions, open-source community, and support for most popular programming languages. However, Postgres’ limited resilience and scalability are stumbling blocks for enterprise and business-critical applications. This is particularly challenging for apps that need to stay online through planned or unplanned outages, scale quickly to meet demand, or keep data in multiple regions.

YugabyteDB retains all the power and familiarity of PostgreSQL by pairing its trusted API with an enterprise-grade distributed architecture. It reuses the PostgreSQL query engine to achieve PostgreSQL runtime compatibility, ensuring features including transactional semantics, retry logic, error codes, system catalog, information schemas, and change data capture behave exactly like Postgres. In addition, users can utilize Yugabyte’s open-source migration tool to streamline modernization from PostgreSQL and legacy databases to YugabyteDB.

The latest version of YugabyteDB goes beyond functional compatibility and delivers on Yugabyte’s promise to enable lift-and-shift modernization of Postgres applications with minimal changes. Today’s announcement includes two key innovations:

1. Adaptive Cost-Based Optimizer: PostgreSQL’s built-in cost-based optimizer (CBO) is critical for handling multiple and diverse workloads. YugabyteDB’s new Adaptive CBO extends the range of PostgreSQL’s CBO for high-scale and multi-region applications. It determines an optimal query plan that considers whether data is co-located, automatically sharded, or even distributed across zones or regions. It also implements core Postgres capabilities such as extended table statistics, parallel plans, and bitmap scans.
2. Smart Data Distribution: Distributed SQL databases typically federate data and query processing across nodes. While this enables workloads to scale, it can degrade the performance of applications built for a traditional database, forcing developers to choose between lower latency and more scalability. YugabyteDB eliminates this forced choice by automatically determining whether to store tables together in a colocated manner for lower latency, or shard and distribute them to achieve massive scale.

To showcase how easy it is to migrate from PostgreSQL to YugabyteDB, Yugabyte has launched its App Century Challenge. This new program invites members of the YugabyteDB Open Source Community to help migrate 100 popular open source Postgres applications to YugabyteDB. In return, Yugabyte will give participants exclusive swag and the experience of working on a cool project that tests the limits of YugabyteDB’s Postgres compatibility.

“We’re thrilled to share this significant milestone on our journey to make YugabyteDB a truly distributed PostgreSQL database for modern applications at any scale,” said Karthik Ranganathan, co-founder and co-CEO at Yugabyte. “The latest version continues to push the boundaries of performance, scalability, and simplicity for enterprises embracing cloud-native architectures while harnessing the power of the world’s most popular database. With these enhanced features and improved compatibility, YugabyteDB further empowers developers and enterprises in their digital transformation journeys.”

Key Results

• Over 92% of PostgreSQL query patterns run with comparable performance on YugabyteDB, up from 47% two years ago. This means developers can port their Postgres applications to YugabyteDB and achieve comparable performance while being able to scale in place when needed.
• YugabyteDB’s Adaptive CBO picks the optimal query plan in 93% of TAQO Framework tests, which is close to the 97% score achieved by Postgres. The TAQO Framework is a query optimizer testing framework for Postgres compatible databases based on research at the University of California at Davis.
• Smart Data Distribution enables YugabyteDB to support over 50,000 database objects – tables, indexes, sequences, and more – compared to 2,000 without smart data distribution. This results in significantly higher scalability.

Experts from Yugabyte will demonstrate YugabyteDB’s latest features and share their vision for the future of distributed databases during the upcoming Distributed SQL Summit (DSS) on November 12. For more information and to register for this virtual event, please visit: https://events.ringcentral.com/events/distributed-sql-summit-2024

For more information, including a full breakdown of YugabyteDB’s new features, please visit www.yugabyte.com/latest-release/.

About Yugabyte

Yugabyte is the company behind YugabyteDB, the open-source, high-performance distributed SQL database for building global, cloud-native applications. YugabyteDB serves business-critical applications with SQL query flexibility, high performance, and cloud-native agility, thus allowing enterprises to focus on business growth instead of complex data infrastructure management. It is trusted by companies in cybersecurity, financial markets, IoT, retail, e-commerce, and other verticals. Founded in 2016 by former Facebook and Oracle engineers, Yugabyte is backed by Lightspeed Venture Partners, 8VC, Dell Technologies Capital, Sapphire Ventures, and others. Learn more information at www.yugabyte.com.