Ranganathan discusses the design considerations that influenced development of YugabyteDB, including the learnings gleaned from the engineering team’s previous work at Facebook.  YugabyteDB can be deployed on premises or as a cloud service. With built-in replication, YugabyteDB can be used to distribute data across geographic regions in support of data localization requirements and for high availability.

Key topics in the interview include: 

  • The Yugabyte engineering team worked on the HBase and Cassandra databases at Facebook, experience that is now carrying over to the work they are doing at Yugabyte.
  • How YugabyteDB is different from other distributed SQL databases, including its support for both SQL and NoSQL interfaces.
  • Common uses cases for Yugabyte DB include real-time transactions, microservices, Edge and IoT applications, and geographically-distributed workloads.
  • Yugabyte is available via Apache 2.0 license and as self-managed and fully-managed cloud services.

Quotes from the podcast: 

  • “One of the important characteristics of transactional data is the fact that it needs to live forever.”
  • “We reuse the upper half of Postgres, so it literally is Postgres-compatible and has all of the features.”
  • “We said we're going to meet developers where they develop. We will support both API's [SQL and NoSQL]. We're not going to invent a new API — that's what people hate.”
  • “It's not the database that people pay money for; it’s the operations of the database and making sure it runs in a turnkey manner that people really find valuable in an enterprise setting.”