New Delhi,  September 2, 2021: Yugabyte, the company behind the leading distributed SQL database,  has announced the general availability of YugabyteDB 2.9. This latest release delivers the industry’s first smart JDBC client driver with an understanding of the distributed architecture of a YugabyteDB cluster.
The Yugabyte Smart Driver for SQL pushes the state of SQL forward, allowing applications to get better performance and fault tolerance by connecting to any node in a distributed SQL database cluster without the need for an external load balancer. The client driver is available as open source software under the Apache 2.0 license.
Since YugabyteDB is feature compatible with PostgreSQL, applications can use many of the widely available PostgreSQL client drivers to connect to a YugabyteDB cluster. However, the new driver is optimized for use with a distributed SQL database. The Yugabyte Smart Driver for SQL is both cluster-aware and topology-aware. The driver keeps track of the members of the cluster as well as their locations. As nodes are added or removed from clusters, the driver updates its membership and topology information.
“Cloud native transactional applications need databases that deliver high availability and scale without sacrificing relational database features,” said Karthik Ranganathan, co-founder and CTO, Yugabyte. “Homegrown solutions address this need by replicating data across nodes and deploying one or more load balancers to connect to the nodes. This approach results in complex and brittle applications that are hard to run in production. Yugabyte is on a mission to simplify this. We are proud to be pushing the boundary of relational databases for a cloud native world with innovations like our distributed SQL database and the Yugabyte Smart Driver for SQL.”