3 min

Yugabyte is an open source distributed SQL database company.

The company has announced YugabyteDB Voyager, a database migration solution that claims to be ‘unified’, a label perhaps suggesting some kind of as-yet defined ubiquitous compatibility prowess.

If unified means anything here outside of marketing spin, it may suggest that YugabyteDB Voyager might enable data-developer departments to shrug off the limitations of legacy and single-cloud databases as they move towards end-to-end cloud-native distributed architectures.

Single-cloud is, of course, not unified – but conversely, cloud-native hybrid-multi-poly-cloud is (at the risk of laying down too many labels in one go) somewhat more unified.

Magical analyst house Gartner predicts cloud spending will overtake traditional IT spending by 2025, with more than half (51%) of IT spending being directed to the cloud model of service-based computing. 

While many may find Gartner’s foresight too precisely specific to be of value, cloud computing does appear to be popular and some industry-watchers will go with the analyst group’s prediction.

Where Yugabyte appears to think it might have some insight is into the challenges organisatons are having when prioritising application modernisation and multi-cloud initiatives i.e. the complexity of moving underlying data to a modern database has delayed efforts, resulting in productivity loss, increased risk and higher operational costs.

Migration seems to be the hardest word

“Our customers want to accelerate their cloud and application initiatives, but database migration is often the biggest barrier preventing them from moving these projects forward. The operational complexity of migrating hundreds of databases from legacy RDBMSs, used for decades, to a modern cloud-native distributed SQL database, can be daunting,” said Karthik Ranganathan, CTO and co-founder, Yugabyte.

Ranganathan promises that YugabyteDB Voyager eliminates these above-described hurdles… but how?

“By providing an end-to-end database migration tool that simplifies the move to YugabyteDB by offering identical steps to migrate databases from any source database to YugabyteDB deployed in any environment. This eliminates the need to research multiple tools and retrain the database team,” he said.

Deeper day 2 data density

By accelerating cloud-native adoption through YugabyteDB Voyager, Ranganathan and team suggest that organisations can lower costs by reducing legacy database spend, increasing data density and reducing ‘day 2’ operational demands.

In addition, YugabyteDB Voyager helps reduce overall risk by providing a consistent and proven process to migrate both schema and data from what the company calls out as ‘legacy database systems’, including Oracle, PostgreSQL and MySQL and from traditional single-cloud databases, like AWS RDS, Aurora, Google Cloud SQL and Azure Database for PostgreSQL.

“Through 2024, six in ten organisations will re-examine current operational database suppliers with a view of supporting more agile and intelligent operational applications and improving fault tolerance,” says Matt Aslett, VP and research director, Ventana Research. “Distributed SQL databases specifically designed to provide scalability and resiliency that extend beyond a single datacenter or cloud instance are attractive options. Database migrations can be costly and complex.”

Aslett is convinced that products designed to facilitate database migration and modernisation, like YugabyteDB Voyager which he directly names, are therefore increasingly important to organisations as they evaluate potential data platform providers.

First announced as a beta offering in 2022, the generally available release includes a number of additional updates and new capabilities based on feedback from a strong set of beta customers, as well as ongoing engineering investment. 

A new Installer is said to improve the deployment and usability of YugabyteDB Voyager, streamlining the process of getting started.