Last updated: October 3 2024
Distributed, transactional, relational databases, sometimes called NewSQL, are a relatively new kind of database that are designed to meet intense data management requirements.
NewSQL databases are fairly similar to traditional, transactional, relational databases. However, they have been built from the ground up to shard and replicate data in order to support strict availability requirements and high query throughput.
Many traditional, transactional, relational databases allow you to replicate and shard data. For example:
However, the implementation of these features are fairly basic compared to their NewSQL successors. For example, quality NewSQL databases will typically allow you to shard data without having to partition it into different tables. They will also allow you some control over where, geographically speaking, certain rows are replicated to. This can be advantageous for database performance and regulation compliance.
For example, you might imagine deploying a NewSQL node in the USA, Canada, and the EU. With this setup, you can keep EU customer data in the EU, USA customer data in the USA, and Canada customer data in Canada. This means that users in those jurisdictions will enjoy a faster application and you will be complying with data sovereignty laws, all while keeping a single database environment. Your devops / SRE / data management team will thank you.
In my opinion, there are three NewSQL databases that are worth investigating. Interestingly, all three of them are at least somewhat compatible with PostgreSQL.
This is the first NewSQL database that comes to my mind. It is mature, open-source, and multi-cloud. The CockroachDB team is first class, and the product has excellent documentation.
Spanner might be the most advanced transactional database system in the world. This makes sense, given that Google itself uses it, and it’s hard to think of an organization with more intense data management needs than Google.
You should strongly consider Spanner if you’re a GCP user.
Yugabyte is another great option that deserves your consideration. Like CockroachDB, it is open-source, multi-cloud, and was developed by a first class development team.