TLDR; The first release of RonDB is now available. RonDB is currently the best low-latency, high availability, high throughput, and high scalability (LATS) database available today. In addition to new documentation and community support, RonDB 21.04.0 brings automated memory configuration, automated thread configuration, improved networking handling, 3x improved performance, bug fixes and new features. It is available as a managed service on the Hopsworks platform and it can also be installed on-premises with the installation scripts or binary tarball.

What’s new in RonDB 21.04.0?

RonDB 21.04.0 is based on MySQL NDB Cluster 8.0.23. The first release includes the following new features and improvements:

• New documentation of RonDB and its use as a managed service.
• Community support for questions and bug reports.
• Automated memory configuration of different memory pools based on available memory
• Automated thread configuration based on the available CPU resources
• Improved CPU and network handling
• Configurable number of replicas
• Integrate benchmarking tools in RonDB distribution
• Performance Improvement in ClusterJ API
  

New documentation

Our new documentation walks through how to use RonDB as a managed service on the Hopsworks platform and to install it on-premises with automated scripts or binary tarball. We have also added new documentation of the RonDB software.

Community support

Welcome to the RonDB community! Feel free to ask any question and our developers will try to reply as soon as possible.

Automatic memory configuration

NDB has historically required setting a large number of configuration parameters to set memory sizes of various memory pools. RonDB 21.04.0 introduces automatic memory configuration taking away all these configuration properties. RonDB data nodes will use the entire memory available in the server/VM. You can limit the amount of memory it can use with a new configuration parameter TotalMemoryConfig.

Automatic thread configuration

For increased performance and stability, RonDB will automate thread configuration. This feature was introduced in NDB 8.0.23, but in RonDB it is the default behaviour. RonDB makes use of all accessible CPUs and also handles CPU locking automatically. Read more about automated thread configuration on our latest blog.

Improved CPU and network handling

RonDB will perform better under heavy load by employing improved heuristics in thread spinning and in the network stack.

Configurable number of replicas

In NDB 8.0.23 and earlier releases of NDB one could only set NoOfReplicas at the initial start of the cluster. The only method to increase or decrease replication level was to perform a backup and restore. In RonDB 21.04.0 we introduce Active and Inactive nodes, making it possible to change the number of replicas without having to perform an initial restart of the cluster.

Integrate benchmarking tools in RonDB distribution

We have integrated a number of benchmark tools to assess the performance of RonDB. Benchmarking RonDB is now easy as we ship Sysbench, DBT2, flexAsynch and DBT3 benchmarks along with our binary distribution. Support for ClusterJ benchmarks are expected to come in upcoming product releases.

Performance Improvement in ClusterJ API

A new addition to the ClusterJ API was added that releases data objects and Session objects to a cache rather than releasing them fully. In addition an improvement of the garbage collection handling in ClusterJ was handled. These improvements led to a 3x improvement in a simple key lookup benchmark.

How to get started with RonDB?

There are three ways to use RonDB 21.04.0:

1. Managed version available on the Enterprise Hopsworks platform. The RonDB cluster is integrated with Hopsworks and can be used for both RonDB applications as well as for Hopsworks applications. Access our full documentation to get started.
2. Open source automated installation. Use a script that automates the creation of VMs and the installation of the software components required by RonDB. These scripts are available to create RonDB clusters on Azure and GCP. This script can be downloaded from https://repo.hops.works/installer/21.04/rondb-cloud-installer.sh.
3. Binary tarball installation. Download the RonDB binary tarball and install it on any computers of your own liking. The binary tarball is available here.

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