Celebrating a decade of distributed SQL innovations

Buffered writes, introduced into Preview, are an under-the-covers way to improve performance by bundling up database writes more efficiently to increase throughput and decrease latency, while also reducing hardware requirements. 

Buffered Writes introduces a new step in the transaction flow, which temporarily stores transaction writes on the client side (gateway) until the transaction commits. This approach minimizes the number of roundtrips to the leaseholders, reduces pipeline stalls, and allows for the passive use of the 1-phase commit fast-path. By deferring writes until commit time, the system can reduce redundant writes and serve read-your-writes locally, resulting in performance gains that in our tests range from 15% (Sysbench oltp_read_write) to 40% (customer-specific testing) improvements.

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Leader leases introduce a new leaseholder into GA mechanism that improves resilience and fault tolerance while reducing the overhead of previous leasing mechanisms. 

• Network partitions between a leaseholder and its followers heal in less than 20 seconds, since the leaseholder no longer needs to heartbeat a single node liveness range.

• Outages caused by liveness failures last less than 1 second, since liveness is now determined by a store-level detection mechanism, not a single node liveness range.

• Performance is equivalent (within less than 1%) to epoch-based leases on a 100 node cluster of 32 vCPU machines with 8 stores each.

• Leader leases are now on by default.
  

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• Scale-up or-down workloads based on application scale and security needs

• Helps to avoid plan lock-in, and lets customers select their plan tiers based on evolving needs and lessons learned. 

• Plan switching supports Basic to Standard (and the reverse), with Standard to Advanced (and the reverse) following later this month.

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Cluster labels enable customers to tag their resources (clusters and folders) to help with categorizing and reporting on cloud resource usage, something particularly helpful in billing reporting.

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Increased provisioned compute on Standard. Standard tier is increasing provisioned compute from 60 vCPUs up to 200 vCPUs to better meet the storage needs of customers.