High-performance database startup Yugabyte Inc. is updating its namesake platform YugabyteDB, targeting developers who prefer to run their applications on the open-source PostgreSQL database.

With today’s update, YugabyteDB is transforming itself from a platform that’s simply Postgres-compatible to become a distributed PostgreSQL database itself. To coincide with that move, it also announced an artificial intelligence-powered tool called the Voyager Modernization Co-Pilot that promises to help developers easily migrate critical data from PostgreSQL systems into Yugabyte DB.

Although not as popular as PostgreSQL databases, YugabyteDB has carved out a reputation for itself as a specialized, high-performance distributed structured query language database that can run in any public or private cloud, as well as Kubernetes environments.

The company says YugabyteDB is ideal for applications that require low query latency, extreme resilience against failures, and global data distribution. Its features include a powerful document store, auto-sharding and per-shard distributed consensus replication with multishare atomicity, consistency, isolation and durability.

Perhaps the best attribute of YugabyteDB is its ability to bundle both SQL and NoSQL capabilities in one platform, meaning it can work with both structured and unstructured data. Because of this, enterprises can standardize all of their critical business workloads on a single, highly distributed database, eliminating the need to maintain multiple databases.

These features help YugabyteDB to stand out, but it remains a relatively niche product, and it’s still far less popular than PostgreSQL. Data from DB-Engines shows that PostgreSQL ranks as the world’s fourth most popular database overall, while YugabyteDB lies in a distant, 108th place.

PostgreSQL’s popularity stems from its mature feature set, its powerful extensions, its vibrant open-source community and its support for dozens of programming languages. However, the database is still plagued by problems with its limited resilience and scalability, which makes it less than ideal for applications that must remain online 24/7, scale rapidly to meet demand, and maintain data in multiple regions.

By becoming a PostgreSQL database itself, YugabyteDB gives developers the best of both worlds. They get all of the power and familiarity of PostgreSQL by pairing its trusted application programming interface with the resilient and distributed architecture of YugabyteDB.

Yugabyte says it reuses the PostgreSQL query engine to achieve PostgreSQL runtime compatibility and ensure that features such as transactional semantics, retry logic, error codes, system catalogs, information schemas and change data capture work exactly the same as they behave in PostgreSQL.

Co-founder and co-Chief Executive Karthik Ranganathan said today’s update means YugabyteDB becomes the first truly distributed PostgreSQL database. “The latest version 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,” he said.

Developers can now use Yugabyte’s Voyager Modernization Co-Pilot to perform simple, lift-and-shift migrations from a traditional PostgreSQL database to YugabyteDB, the company said.

Yugabyte added that it has not only mirrored the capabilities of PostgreSQL, but also improved some of them in its latest release. Its new Adaptive Cost-Based Optimizer improves on the capabilities of the built-in PostgreSQL cost-based optimizer, which is critical for handling multiple, diverse workloads. According to Yugabyte, its adaptive version extends the range of PostgreSQL’s CBO to cover high-scale and multi-region applications, determining the most optimal query plan that takes into consideration whether the data is co-located, automatically sharded or distributed across regions.

Image: SiliconANGLE/Microsoft Designer