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What’s New in GridGain 9

Stanislav Lukyanov GridGain
Stanislav Lukyanov

Our latest release, GridGain 9, is more than an upgrade – it’s a significant leap forward for our Unified Real-Time Data Platform. New capabilities include a more robust transaction management and consistency model for data; full support for SQL workloads; enhanced support for multiple data formats, models, and stores, including cloud data lakehouses; high-throughput data stream processing; and dynamic on-demand scaling. 

These enhancements significantly improve the platform's durability, performance, and scalability while reinforcing its capability to replace complex relational database scenarios with a real-time data store. GridGain 9 further allows you to expand your use cases, including unlocking new possibilities for your business. 

Read on to discover more about GridGain 9!

 

Dynamic,
on-demand scaling
GridGain 9 introduces new platform features, allowing users to scale its flexible in-memory and on-disk storage and processing capacity easily. GridGain’s industry-leading capabilities around dynamic scaling eliminate any impact on the overall system performance, even when users wish to extend their GridGain clusters to the cloud.
Enhanced
performance
GridGain 9 boosts efficiency by enhancing parallel, concurrent data processing and utilizing memory-centric storage engines tailored to the specific needs of various workloads, including transactions, analytics 
and AI.
Stronger data
integrity and consistency
With a more robust transaction management and consistency model for data – even in full SQL mode – GridGain 9 gives enterprises classic RDBMS capabilities with in-memory performance, making it easier to accelerate legacy applications and workloads.
Improved
developer experience
Intuitive and simpler APIs, improved cluster configuration, and devOps capabilities make it even easier for developers and DevOps engineers to build and manage highly scalable data-intensive applications using GridGain.

Key GridGain 9 enhancements

 

GridGain 9 enhancements build on the robust capabilities of GridGain 8.9 with significant investments in three key areas: a) enhanced support for distributed SQL workloads, b) architectural changes to reinforce platform durability, performance, and scalability, and c) improved usability.

Specific new GridGain 9 capabilities include:

Enhanced Support for Distributed SQL

  • Seamless Transaction Support: Transactions are now seamlessly supported across all APIs, including SQL. With strictly serializable SQL transaction capabilities, migrating applications from legacy RDBMS platforms is simplified.
  • Advanced SQL Engine: GridGain 9 features a new SQL engine based on Apache Calcite, optimizing distributed query execution for better performance, even with complex queries.
  • ANSI SQL 2016 Compliance: GridGain 9 upgrades from ANSI SQL 99 to ANSI SQL 2016 compliance, reinforcing our commitment to fully-featured distributed SQL support.
  • Flexible Data Schema Management: Updated data schema management simplifies creating multi-model workloads. SQL, Key-Value API, and the new Record API now correspond to the same data with minimal configuration. Dynamic schema changes, such as adding, removing, or modifying columns, enable iterative development and align GridGain’s distributed SQL behavior with traditional RDBMS.

Architectural Reinforcement

  • Enhanced Consistency and Scalability: GridGain 9 introduces a new transactional protocol with a strictly serializable model, ensuring data safety and simplifying the development of distributed transactional applications. Lock-free, transactionally consistent reads support massive application concurrency and scalability.
  • Hardened Data Replication: The new data replication core based on the Raft algorithm offers unprecedented scalability and robustness, both on-premise and in the Cloud. Built-in split-brain protection requires no additional configuration or tools, maintaining data integrity even with network imperfections.
  • Pluggable Storage Feature: The new Pluggable Storage feature allows applications to choose the appropriate storage engine. Alongside the established Page Memory and Native Persistence, the platform now supports a RocksDB-based storage engine, accelerating use cases with high write volumes. This expands real-time application deployment for scenarios like training AI models with IoT data streams or executing large-scale real-time click-stream analytics for personalization.

Usability Enhancements

  • New Record API: The Record API merges programming power in languages like Java, C#, or C++ with a familiar SQL-like data model, facilitating the migration of existing applications without altering them to use a key-value model.
  • Simplified Installation: New installation packages ensure easy deployment on any operating system, container platform, or Cloud, aligning with the platform’s best practices.
  • Improved Management Tools: An updated REST API and new command-line interface streamline the installation, configuration, and management of the platform.
  • Dynamic Cluster Configuration: Cluster configurations can now be dynamically updated using REST or CLI, simplifying the management of mission-critical, always-on workloads.

  • Modern Configuration Language: Configuration files now use HOCON, a modern, concise, and powerful language that replaces GridGain 8’s legacy Spring XML configuration. HOCON’s compatibility with JSON and YAML improves readability and integrates with a wide array of tools.

     

GridGain 9 delivers the strongest possible foundation for even more exciting features to come in future releases, and enables the next generation of real-time data-driven applications, transactional processing, analytics, and AI.

For more information on GridGain 9, check out the product page, read the press release, or schedule a technical overview of version 9.0 of the GridGain Unified Real-Time Data Platform.
 

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