YugabyteDB Has a Free API: Distributed PostgreSQL for Cloud-Native Apps

YugabyteDB is an open-source distributed SQL database that is PostgreSQL-compatible. It combines the scale of NoSQL with the features of SQL, providing automatic sharding, replication, and geo-distribution.

What Is YugabyteDB?

YugabyteDB provides a PostgreSQL-compatible API (YSQL) and a Cassandra-compatible API (YCQL) in a single database. It uses a Google Spanner-inspired architecture with Raft consensus for strong consistency.

Key Features:

• PostgreSQL wire compatible (YSQL)
• Cassandra compatible (YCQL)
• Automatic sharding and rebalancing
• Synchronous replication (Raft)
• Geo-distributed deployments
• Row-level geo-partitioning
• Distributed transactions
• Change data capture (CDC)

Quick Start

# Docker
docker run -d --name yugabyte -p 5433:5433 -p 9000:9000 -p 9042:9042 \
  yugabytedb/yugabyte:latest bin/yugabyted start --daemon=false

# Connect with psql
psql -h localhost -p 5433 -U yugabyte

# Web UI at http://localhost:9000

YSQL API (PostgreSQL-Compatible)

import psycopg2

# Same psycopg2 driver as PostgreSQL!
conn = psycopg2.connect(
    host="localhost", port=5433,
    user="yugabyte", dbname="yugabyte"
)
cur = conn.cursor()

# Create table
cur.execute("""
    CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS products (
        id SERIAL PRIMARY KEY,
        name TEXT NOT NULL,
        price DECIMAL(10,2),
        category TEXT,
        created_at TIMESTAMPTZ DEFAULT NOW()
    )
""")

# Insert with RETURNING
cur.execute("""
    INSERT INTO products (name, price, category)
    VALUES (%s, %s, %s) RETURNING id
""", ("Widget Pro", 29.99, "Hardware"))
product_id = cur.fetchone()[0]
print(f"Created product: {product_id}")

# Full SQL including CTEs, window functions, JSON
cur.execute("""
    WITH ranked AS (
        SELECT name, price, category,
               ROW_NUMBER() OVER (PARTITION BY category ORDER BY price DESC) as rank
        FROM products
    )
    SELECT name, price, category FROM ranked WHERE rank <= 3
""")
for row in cur.fetchall():
    print(f"{row[0]}: ${row[1]} ({row[2]})")

conn.commit()
conn.close()

YCQL API (Cassandra-Compatible)

from cassandra.cluster import Cluster

cluster = Cluster(["localhost"], port=9042)
session = cluster.connect()

session.execute("""
    CREATE KEYSPACE IF NOT EXISTS myapp
    WITH replication = {'class': 'SimpleStrategy', 'replication_factor': 1}
""")
session.set_keyspace("myapp")

session.execute("""
    CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS events (
        user_id UUID,
        event_time TIMESTAMP,
        event_type TEXT,
        PRIMARY KEY (user_id, event_time)
    ) WITH CLUSTERING ORDER BY (event_time DESC)
""")

YugabyteDB Admin API

import requests

# Master API
master = requests.get("http://localhost:7000/api/v1/cluster-config").json()
print(f"Replication factor: {master.get('replication_info', {})}")

# Tablet server metrics
metrics = requests.get("http://localhost:9000/metrics").text
print(metrics[:200])

# Table info
tables = requests.get("http://localhost:7000/api/v1/tables").json()
for table in tables:
    print(f"Table: {table['keyspace']}.{table['table_name']}")

Geo-Distribution

-- Create tablespace for geo-partitioning
CREATE TABLESPACE us_east WITH (
    replica_placement = '{"num_replicas":3, "placement_blocks":[
        {"cloud":"aws","region":"us-east-1","zone":"us-east-1a","min_num_replicas":1}]}'
);

-- Row-level geo-partitioning
CREATE TABLE users (
    id UUID, region TEXT, name TEXT, email TEXT,
    PRIMARY KEY (id, region)
) PARTITION BY LIST (region);

CREATE TABLE users_us PARTITION OF users FOR VALUES IN ('us')
    TABLESPACE us_east;

Resources

• YugabyteDB Docs
• YugabyteDB GitHub — 9K+ stars

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