What’s New in YugabyteDB Docs – March 2021

Welcome to the latest edition of what’s new and improved in Yugabyte Docs. We’re always adding new and updating existing documentation to provide you with the most up-to-date information on YugabyteDB, Yugabyte Platform, and our database ecosystem.

YugabyteDB Core

We had previously launched the Explore section to help users get started with YugabyteDB. YugabyteDB is an open source distributed SQL database that uniquely combines enterprise-grade RDBMS capabilities with the horizontal scalability and resilience of cloud native architectures.

This section uses an intuitive design to help you explore the benefits of YugabyteDB and try out some of the latest features. This includes the following:

• YSQL vs PostgreSQL
• Fault tolerance
• Horizontal Scalability
• Transactions
• JSON Support
• Multi-Region Deployments
• Query Optimization
• Follower reads
• Colocated tables
• Change data capture (CDC)
• Observability

Here are some recent additions to the Explore section of the core database documentation:

• How to use YSQL triggers when performing data manipulation and definition
• YugabyteDB table partitioning using YSQL
• An overview of queries, joins, and subqueries
• Information on range types
• A series of articles on query optimization
• An article on data manipulation using YSQL
• Spring Framework support for YugabyteDB

Here are some recent additions to the APIs > YSQL section of the core database documentation:

• Two additions to the “The WITH clause and common table expressions” section: Using a recursive CTE to traverse graphs of all kinds; and (as an example of how to use these techniques) Case study—using a recursive CTE to traverse an employee hierarchy.
• Range data types. This is the companion reference documentation to the corresponding new section in the “Explore” section.

Yugabyte Platform

For organizations that want to use YugabyteDB in enterprise cloud native environments at scale, Yugabyte Platform adds software and support to the open source YugabyteDB for enterprises to streamline the operational experience.

Yugabyte Platform gives you the confidence and support to be successful with YugabyteDB for mission-critical deployments. Use Yugabyte Platform to deploy YugabyteDB across any cloud anywhere in the world with a few clicks, simplify day-2 operations through automation, and get the services needed to realize business outcomes with the database.

Similar to YugabyteDB docs, the Yugabyte Platform docs are designed to help you explore the Yugabyte Platform, which includes our highly resilient, scalable, distributed SQL database and our cloud native operational excellence capabilities to deliver a private DBaaS. This includes the following:

• Overview
• Install Yugabyte Platform
• Configure Yugabyte Platform
• Create deployments
• Manage deployments
• Backup and Restore universes
• Security
• Alerts and monitoring
• Troubleshoot
• Administer Yugabyte Platform

We’ve updated the Yugabyte Platform documentation in multiple areas, mainly installation and security. In particular, we’ve made a lot of updates to Data in Transit Encryption.

Docs Infrastructure

• We’ve made some changes to the docs builds lately, including adding build previews to every pull request targeting the master branch in the yugabyte-db repository. We’re working to make the docs build faster, as well.
• If you use Markdownlint, you may have noticed a configuration file for that tool in the docs section of the repo recently. (If you don’t, try it out! The VS Code extension works very well, as does the CLI…)
• 404s and broken images? All gone now.
• We’ve de-duplicated a number of content sections.

What’s next?

We’ll be documenting new features in the upcoming releases of YugabyteDB and Yugabyte Platform. We’ll also continue adding new content to the Explore section, with YSQL expressions and procedure calls next on our list.

If you find our products interesting and would like to contribute, here are some ways you can get involved:

• File GitHub issues for the docs. If you discover missing information, incorrect information, unclear explanations, or have new topics you’d like to see, click New issue and add the “area/documentation” label.
• Contribute to the YugabyteDB docs. Share your knowledge and lessons learned with Yugabyte by contributing to the YugabyteDB Docs. You’ll get recognition and rewards for your efforts as part of our Community Heroes program.
• Ask questions and share answers in our Slack community. Your questions in the yugabyte-db Slack community are seen by fellow members and contributors who are there to help you move forward. Additionally, we routinely create new documentation pages based on topics that are of interest to Slack community users.