The Apache Software Foundation announced that Apache ShardingSphere, a distributed Big Data middleware ecosystem, has now graduated to a Top-Level Project.

“Since entering the Apache Incubator, ShardingSphere has evolved from a JDBC driver for sharding into a distributed ecosystem,”  said Liang Zhang, the vice president of Apache ShardingSphere. 

The Apache ShardingSphere ecosystem has 3 sub-projects that form the database solutions: 

  1. ShardingSphere-JDBC, which is a lightweight Java framework that provides extra service at the Java JDBC layer, 
  2. ShardingSphere-Proxy, a database proxy, 
  3. and ShardingSphere-Sidecar (TODO) a cloud-native database agent of the Kubernetes environment that controls the access to the database in the form of a sidecar.

ShardingSphere provides data sharding, distributed transactions, data migration, as well as database and data governance features. It also includes an independent SQL parser for multiple SQL dialects that can be used independently of ShardingSphere, and a pluggable micro-kernel that enables all SQL dialects and features to be plugged in and out by service provider interfaces, according to the team. 

“Application architecture needs to transform from a traditional monolithic architecture to a microservice architecture. At the same time, more flexible data governance capability is needed, which can inherit the most familiar relationship database technology to meet the increasing data volume or new data usage scenarios,” said Grissom Wang, products vice president of DaoCloud, which uses ShardingSphere as the core component of DaoCLoud’s database. “Relational database middleware is a suitable solution: it allows applications to continue to use the relational database access method, and at the same time fully and reasonably utilize the computing and storage capabilities of multiple relational databases in a distributed scenario.”

The project was originally developed at Dangdang Information Technology and was submitted to the Apache Incubator in November 2018.

Additional details are available here.