Google Cloud Launches AlloyDB

The tech giant is expanding its cloud database portfolio with a new service that improves PostgreSQL database performance and speeds up analytics queries.

With the launch of AlloyDB in preview at the Google I/O virtual conference, Google is adding a new cloud database to its portfolio.

Users with a large amount of data will now have a new cloud storage option. AlloyDB is a new database option from Google Cloud Platform (GCP), which is based on the PostgreSQL open-source database, which has been a popular choice among developers for over 30 years.

In our performance tests, AlloyDB outperformed standard PostgreSQL by more than four times for transactional workloads and up to 100 times for analytical queries. AlloyDB was also twice as fast as Amazon’s comparable service for transactional workloads. As a result, AlloyDB is a powerful new modernization option for moving away from legacy databases.

Google AlloyDB Enables Transactional Application And Analytics 

In recent years, vendors have begun to embrace the combination of transactional and analytical capabilities in databases. While IDC calls the capability ATP, Forrester Research refers to it as an analytical database, and vendors like PingCAP call it hybrid transactional and analytical processing. 

Google’s other database options, such as Cloud Spanner and BigQuery, pale in comparison to AlloyDB. BigQuery is for large table queries, Spanner is for multi-region distributed database processing, and AlloyDB can handle both transactional and analytical workloads.

Since AlloyDB is native to Google’s file system, Colossus, it optimises data storage in addition to analytical and transaction processing.

AlloyDB Will Modernise Your Existing Application With:

• Superior Performance and Scale: For your most demanding commercial-grade workloads, AlloyDB provides superior performance and scale. For transactional workloads, AlloyDB is four times faster than standard PostgreSQL and two times faster than Amazon’s comparable PostgreSQL-compatible service. Customers get best-in-class price/performance thanks to multiple layers of caching that are automatically tiered based on workload patterns.

• Real-time Business Insight: For analytical queries, AlloyDB is up to 100 times faster than PostgreSQL. By storing data in memory in an optimised columnar format, a vectorized columnar accelerator allows for faster scans and aggregations. AlloyDB is thus an ideal choice for BI, reporting, and mixed transactional and analytical workloads (HTAP). Even better, the accelerator is auto-populated, allowing you to improve analytical performance immediately.

• Industry-leading Availability: AlloyDB provides a service level agreement (SLA) of 99.99 percent availability, which includes maintenance. AlloyDB detects and recovers most database failures in seconds, regardless of database size or load. AlloyDB’s architecture also supports non-disruptive instance resizing and database maintenance. Users are completely unaware of replica pool updates, so the primary instance can resume normal operations in seconds. As a result, customers will have a highly reliable, always-available database for mission-critical workloads.

• ML-assisted Management and Insight: Patching, backups, scaling, and replication are all handled by AlloyDB, like many other managed database services. Adaptive algorithms and machine learning are used for PostgreSQL vacuum management, storage and memory management, data tiering, and analytics acceleration. It learns your workload and intelligently organises your data in memory, a fast secondary cache, and long-term storage. These automated capabilities make management easier for DBAs and developers. Customers can also use AlloyDB to improve machine learning in their applications. Users can call models directly within a query or transaction thanks to built-in integration with Vertex AI, Google Cloud’s artificial intelligence platform. This translates to high throughput, low latency, and enhanced insights without the need for additional application code.

• Predictable, Transparent Pricing: Cost control has never been easier thanks to AlloyDB. Pricing is clear and predictable because there are no hidden fees or obfuscated I/O charges. Customers are only charged for what they use, with read replicas incurring no additional storage fees. To maximise price/performance, use a free ultra-fast cache that is automatically provisioned in addition to instance memory.

Final Thoughts

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