Announcing YugabyteDB 2.15 and YugabyteDB Voyager: The Future of Distributed SQL

Welcome to YugabyteDB Product Week! We are thrilled to announce one of the most extensive updates to YugabyteDB since its initial launch. YugabyteDB 2.15 and our new YugabyteDB Voyager are available now!

Our latest database release introduces a suite of features focused on dynamic workload optimization, developer productivity features, and improved performance.

YugabyteDB Voyager, our new open source data migration engine, simplifies the movement of traditional and cloud-based databases to YugabyteDB. By freeing your data from non-distributed databases, you can accelerate your cloud native initiatives.

Together, these updates enable organizations to effortlessly deploy and run the widest range of cloud native transactional applications. Even better, they can do so in any cloud at any scale with exceptional performance.

The future of Distributed SQL

If you don’t have the time to read the full details below, here are the key new innovations to be aware of!

• With the addition of READ_COMMITTED isolation with pessimistic locking, YugabyteDB 2.15 is the first Distributed SQL database to offer all three PostgreSQL isolation levels
• You can achieve up to 20x higher performance for data loading than other distributed SQL databases
• The new YugabyteDB Voyager also delivers a powerful migration engine to unblock you from moving your apps AND data to the cloud
• The new YugabyteDB Performance Advisor improves performance across SQL queries, cluster topology, and schema design
• Finally, ensure increased automation and resiliency with new REST API and multi-region clusters for YugabyteDB Managed

Now, let’s get into the details of these two announcements…

We’ll walk you through the main themes of these new releases and introduce the key features. Watch out for our follow-up blogs all this week. These posts explain the key features in more detail, with some practical application examples. You can also jump straight into our docs to read the main details of the 2.15 release at docs.yugabyte.com.

Support diverse workloads with any usage pattern

Modern organizations have a wide mix of transactional applications. These applications increasingly have a diverse set of needs, often needing support simultaneously on the same database.

YugabyteDB 2.15’s new capabilities enable users to cover a wide set of existing and new transactional workloads with a single, unified database:

• Enhanced Quality of Service: Ensure critical services achieve their performance objectives with enhancements that support write-heavy workloads. Two key new Admission Controls—one for write-heavy workloads and the other for transaction priorities—help deliver smooth cluster operation during heavy utilization.
• Multi-Tenancy: Consolidate multiple tenants or services onto a single, unified database. This database also contains rate limiting connections that limit the resource usage of any one tenant or service.
• Dynamic App-Aware Sharding: Support the growing set of modern applications that have diverse needs (like running both large and small tables) using intelligent sharding.

Enable developers to build quicker and ship faster

YugabyteDB 2.15 delivers a huge set of new features aimed to make it easier for developers to build applications on a distributed SQL database. Additionally, developers can port existing applications with the industry’s most PostgreSQL-compatible distributed SQL database.

• READ_COMMITTED Isolation with Pessimistic Locking: YugabyteDB is the industry’s first and only distributed SQL database to support all three PostgreSQL isolation levels. Taken together, READ_COMMITTED isolation and pessimistic locking let developers take applications and effortlessly deploy them on YugabyeDB.
• New Webhook and Cloud Storage Sinks for CDC: Drive real-time insights and increase flexibility with support for new sinks. These include HTTPS (Webhook) to deliver messages to any HTTP endpoint and Cloud Storage (S3) to stream to Snowflake and others—these expand on existing Kafka sink.
• Support for new PostgreSQL Features: Extend Yugabyte’s commitment to being the most-PostgreSQL compatible distributed SQL database with GA support for Materialized Views and support for CREATE LANGUAGE.
• Ecosystem Expansion: When building modern web applications, developers often find data modeling and data access to be productivity bottlenecks. This release delivers new enhancements and capabilities to help developers accelerate their onboarding. Additionally, they can leverage familiar, proven tools like Prisma, Django and GORM.
• Cloud APIs: Embrace automation and Infrastructure-as-Code tools with the new REST API for YugabyteDB Managed. Specifically, this allows you to create and manage clusters programmatically. You can also perform automated actions such as pause/resume cluster when not in use, scale cluster up/down based on a schedule, and integrate with third party tools.
• Multi-Region clusters in YugabyteDB Managed: With a few clicks, easily configure and deploy a multi-region cluster in Yugabyte’s fully-managed DBaaS offering. This provides the fastest path for developers and operators to configure a multi-region YugabyteDB Managed environment. With this feature, you can leave the day-to-day operations and management to Yugabyte.

Discover worry-free performance

Simply supporting a wide set of applications is not enough. Modern organizations demand predictable performance across their applications to satisfy rising customer expectations. Numerous performance enhancements in YugabyteDB 2.15 help you optimize performance for existing applications and decrease time-to-market for new applications.

• Performance Advisor: Improve performance across SQL queries, cluster topology and schema design with a built-in advisor that provides performance analytics and recommendations. This also reduces the time and effort required by developers and administrators to diagnose performance issues of queries and quickly implement recommendations.
• Fast Bulk Load of Data: Lower your time to market by loading data into new applications up to 20x faster. This is due to enhancements including new packed columns and faster COPY command. Additionally, internal tests show YugabyteDB can now load data faster than leading Distributed SQL competitors.
• Query Optimizations: Improve customer experience with faster queries thanks to the introduction of several pushdown and scanning improvements. Updates include expression pushdowns, new pushdowns for RowComparisonExpression filters, and enabling DocDB to process lookups on a subset of the range key.

Accelerate cloud native adoption

Organizations need the flexibility to run applications anywhere. However, one of the biggest barriers to application mobility is moving the data out of legacy databases.

Built on a powerful data migration engine, YugabyteDB Voyager removes application migration barriers, ensuring underlying data is transferred easily and safely.

YugabyteDB Voyager is an open source tool available today on GitHub as beta. Numerous additional enhancements are also planned throughout this year.

Finally, YugabyteDB Voyager allows customers to migrate quickly and easily from legacy databases (Oracle, PostgreSQL, MySQL, MariaDB) and common public cloud databases (AWS RDS, Aurora, Google Cloud SQL, Azure DB for PostgreSQL) to YugabyteDB. A primary use case is helping customers migrate to the cloud and YugabyteDB Managed running on your choice of public clouds.

Get started and learn more

We’re thrilled to be able to deliver these enterprise-grade features in the newest version of our flagship product – YugabyteDB 2.15. We also invite you to learn more and try it out:

• YugabyteDB 2.15 is available to download now! Installing the release just takes a few minutes.
• Join the YugabyteDB Slack Community for interactions with the broader YugabyteDB community and real-time discussions with our engineering teams.

Finally, Register for our 4th annual Distributed SQL Summit taking place in September.

NOTE: Following YugabyteDB release versioning standards, YugabyteDB 2.15 is a preview release. Many of these features are now generally available in our latest stable release, YugabyteDB 2.16.