YugabyteDB Distributed SQL

YugabyteDB is an open-source distributed SQL database for global, internet-scale applications. Founded in 2016 by former Facebook engineers Kannan Muthukkaruppan, Karthik Ranganathan, and Mikhail Bautin, YugabyteDB has raised over $290 million and has over 9,000 stars as of 2026. YugabyteDB is PostgreSQL-compatible (same SQL dialect and wire protocol) while providing horizontal scalability, global data distribution, and strong consistency. Key features include: PostgreSQL compatibility (wire protocol, SQL dialect, extensions, stored procedures, window functions, CTEs, and JSON), distributed architecture (sharding tables across nodes using Raft consensus for high availability), horizontal write scalability (automatically splitting and rebalancing tablets for linear scale-out), geo-distribution (distributing data across regions and clouds with configurable replication and geo-partitioning), strong consistency (linearizable reads and writes via Raft consensus), ACID distributed transactions with snapshot isolation, tablet architecture (individually replicated and migrated for load balancing), automatic hash-based and range-based sharding, geo-distributed read replicas with tunable consistency, point-in-time recovery with continuous backups, CDC (Change Data Capture for streaming to Kafka), and xCluster (async replication between independent clusters for disaster recovery).