Yugabyte, the company behind YugabyteDB, the open-source, high-performance, distributed SQL database for building global, cloud-native applications, is announcing new features that empower developers to run cloud-native PostgreSQL applications on YugabyteDB without altering any code. These new enhancements—dubbed enhanced Postgres compatibility—serve to maintain the power and familiarity of PostgreSQL while transforming it as an enterprise-grade distributed database that meets the needs of modern, cloud-native applications.
PostgreSQL is one of the most popular databases among developers—yet, its limited resilience and scalability pose significant challenges for enterprises and their business-critical applications, according to Yugabyte.
To remediate these challenges, Yugabyte’s enhanced Postgres compatibility serves to offer both the strengths of PostgreSQL and the benefits of a distributed system, empowering built-in resilience and dynamic scalability. By reusing the PostgreSQL query engine to achieve PostgreSQL runtime compatibility, a variety of features—such as transactional semantics, retry logic, error codes, system catalog, and more—behave exactly like Postgres within YugabyteDB.
“We’ve delivered on our architectural commitment to provide runtime compatibility with PostgreSQL while continuing to push the needle forward on YugabyteDB’s cloud native capabilities,” said Karthik Ranganathan, co-founder and CEO of Yugabyte. “For the first time, a distributed database offers enhanced Postgres compatibility that balances workload portability with dynamic scalability.”
Additionally, YugabyteDB’s open source migration tool empowers a “lift-and-shift modernization” of Postgres applications with little changes.
“Enabling ‘lift-and-shift modernization’ of PostgreSQL applications to YugabyteDB means developers don’t have to worry about migration challenges. Developers should be able to migrate applications built for PostgreSQL with minimal changes (lift-and-shift) and have those apps run without errors and with performance that is comparable with PostgreSQL,” explained Ranganathan. “When their applications need scale, they can use the capabilities of the distributed database to scale in place without needing to migrate again.”
Yugabyte’s enhanced Postgres compatibility debuts two key capabilities:
- Adaptive Cost-Based Optimizer (CBO): The new Adaptive CBO expands Postgres’ CBO, which is traditionally inefficient for modern, cloud-native applications running on a distributed database. By extending its range to high-scale, multi-region applications, the Adaptive CBO can determine an optimal query plan, considering whether data is co-located, automatically sharded, or distributed across zones or regions. This extension continues to offer core Postgres CBO capabilities, such as extended table statistics, parallel plans, and bitmap scans.
- Smart Data Distribution: To improve the balances of performance queries, Smart Data Distribution automatically determines whether data in tables should be independently federated (sharded) and distributed across the nodes in a cluster to achieve massive scalability or stored together in a single shard for lower latency. This feature also optimizes the access of local data to further improve performance.
“The latest version [of Postgres compatibility] 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,” noted Ranganathan. “[Additionally,] with its commitment to open source, Yugabyte offers customers strategic flexibility while fostering essential feedback loops for rapid, collaborative, and community-driven development.”
To learn more about YugabyteDB, please visit https://www.yugabyte.com/.