Liquibase is an open source and extensible change management project that supports a variety of databases including Snowflake, MySQL, and PostgreSQL via JDBC. Liquibase allows users to easily define changes in SQL, XML, JSON, and YAML. These changes are then managed in a version control system so the changes can be documented, ordered, and standardized. For more information on the features and benefits of Liquibase, check out their documentation site.

In this blog post we’ll show you how to:

• Install a 3 node YugabyteDB cluster on Google Kubernetes Engine
• Build the sample Northwind database
• Install and configure Liquibase
• Create a simple changeset and verify the results
• Explore how changes are documented and managed in Liquibase

New to distributed SQL or YugabyteDB? Read on.

What is Distributed SQL?

Distributed SQL databases are becoming popular with organizations interested in moving data infrastructure to the cloud or cloud native environments. This is often motivated by the desire to reduce TCO or move away from the horizontal scaling limitations of monolithic RDBMS like Oracle, PostgreSQL, MySQL, and SQL Server. The basic characteristics of Distributed SQL are:

• They must have a SQL API for querying and modeling data, with support for traditional RDBMS features like foreign keys, partial indexes, stored procedures, and triggers.
• Automatic distributed query execution so that no single node becomes a bottleneck.
• Should support automatic and transparent distributed data storage. This includes indexes, which should be sharded across multiple nodes of the cluster so that no single node becomes a bottleneck. Data distribution ensures high performance and high availability.
• Distributed SQL systems should also provide for strongly consistent replication and distributed ACID transactions.

For a deeper discussion about what Distributed SQL is, check out, “What is Distributed SQL?”

What is YugabyteDB?

YugabyteDB is an open source, high-performance distributed SQL database built on a scalable and fault-tolerant design inspired by Google Spanner. YugabyteDB is PostgreSQL wire compatible, cloud native, offers deep integration with GraphQL projects, plus supports advanced RDBMS features like stored procedures, triggers, and UDFs.

Got questions? Make sure to ask them in our YugabyteDB Slack channel. Ok, let’s dive in…

Step 1: Install YugabyteDB on a GKE Cluster using Helm 3

In this section we are going to install YugabyteDB on the cluster. The complete steps are documented here. We’ll assume you already have a GKE cluster up and running as a starting point.

The first thing to do is to add the charts repository.

$ helm repo add yugabytedb https://charts.yugabyte.com

Now, fetch the updates.

$ helm repo update

Create a namespace. In this case we’ll call it yb-demo.

$ kubectl create namespace yb-demo

Expected output:

namespace/yb-demo created

We are now ready to install YugabyteDB. In the command below we’ll be specifying values for a resource constrained environment.

$ helm install yb-demo yugabytedb/yugabyte \
--set resource.master.requests.cpu=1,resource.master.requests.memory=1Gi,\
resource.tserver.requests.cpu=1,resource.tserver.requests.memory=1Gi,\
enableLoadBalancer=True --namespace yb-demo --wait

To check the status of the cluster, execute the below command:

$ kubectl get services --namespace yb-demo

Note the external-IP for yb-tserver-service which we are going to use to establish a connection between YugabyteDB and Liquibase. From the screenshot above we can see that the IP is 34.72.XX.XX and the YSQL port is 5433.

#databases #distributed sql #google cloud platform #how to #kubernetes #liquibase