Open Source distributed Big Data middleware ecosystem used for partitioning data, distributed transactions, and database orchestration by more than 120 organizations, including video sharing site Bilibili, commercial bank China MINSHENG Bank, telecommunications and mobile provider China Telecom, eCommerce retailer JD.com, and delivery courier ZTO Express, among many others.

Wakefield, MA —16 April 2020— The Apache Software Foundation (ASF), the all-volunteer developers, stewards, and incubators of more than 350 Open Source projects and initiatives, announced today Apache® ShardingSphere™ as a Top-Level Project (TLP).

Apache ShardingSphere is a distributed Big Data middleware ecosystem. The project was originally developed at Dangdang Information Technology, and was submitted to the Apache Incubator in November 2018.

"Graduating as a Top-Level Project reflects the efforts of the Apache ShardingSphere community over the past year and a half," said Liang Zhang, Vice President of Apache ShardingSphere. "Since entering the Apache Incubator, ShardingSphere has evolved from a JDBC driver for sharding into a distributed ecosystem. We thank our mentors, contributors, and the Apache Incubator for their support, especially during the challenges with the coronavirus outbreak. Moreover, the community has been active and diverse, with more than 120 contributors from all over the world involved with the project."
 
The Apache ShardingSphere ecosystem has 3 sub-projects that form the database solutions, nicknamed “JPS”, for:
 
  • ShardingSphere-JDBC —a lightweight Java framework that provides extra service at the Java JDBC (“Java Database Connectivity”) layer. It provides service in the form of JAR (“Java ARchive”) that requires no additional deployment or dependencies. It can be considered as an enhanced JDBC driver, which is fully compatible with JDBC and all kinds of ORM (Object/Relational Mapping) frameworks.

  • ShardingSphere-Proxy —database proxy that provides a database server that encapsulates database binary protocol to support all developed languages and any terminal.
     
  • ShardingSphere-Sidecar (TODO) —a Cloud-native database agent of the Kubernetes environment that controls the access to the database in the form of sidecar (supporting services deployed with the main application). It provides a mesh layer interacting with the database, known as “Database Mesh”.
 
Apache ShardingSphere's highlights include:
 
  • Completely distributed database solution that provides data sharding, distributed transactions, data migration, as well as database and data governance features.

  • Independent SQL parser for multiple SQL dialects that can be used independently of ShardingSphere.

  • Pluggable micro-kernel that enables all SQL dialects, database protocols and features to be plugged-in and pulled-out by service provider interfaces.
 
Apache ShardingSphere is in use at more than 120 organizations, including Bilibili video sharing site, China MINSHENG Bank, China Telecom Bestpay, DaoCloud, JD.com, Tingyun, and ZTO Express, among others.
 
"Glad to see the ShardingSphere community and contributors grow actively," said Hao Zheng, Senior Director of Jingdong Digital Technology Center. "It has already promoted and pushed the IT architecture of many enterprises to improve rapidly. ShardingSphere is widely used across JD.com, which validates its power and flexibility. Congratulations on graduation of Apache ShardingSphere from the Incubator!"
 
"In the past two years, we have witnessed ShardingSphere grow from small to large," said XiaoHu Zhang, General Manager and Senior Director of China Telecom Bestpay Technology Innovation Center, and Apache ShardingSphere committer. "It's a vibrant community with a group of contributors who are constantly contributing to it. Congratulations! We graduated!"

"Today, the number of customers and scenarios faced by the enterprise is increasing exponentially," said Grissom Wang, Products Vice President of DaoCloud. "Therefore, 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. 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. We researched many Open Source technologies, and chose ShardingSphere as the core component of DaoCloud database governance because of its functional characteristics, openness, scalability, and active community that meet the needs of the enterprise."

"Congratulations to the Apache ShardingSphere community," said Von Gosling, Apache ShardingSphere Incubator Mentor, original developer of Apache RocketMQ and OpenMessaging. "Graduation from the Incubator marks an important milestone for the Apache ShardingSphere project. This is recognition of the focus and hard work of the project members to learn The Apache Way and drive community around ShardingSphere. I am honored to have helped the project to successfully graduate, and wish its continued development in Cloud-Native Era."

"I am glad to see the ShardingSphere community becomegraduate from the Apache Incubator," said Dongxu Huang, Founder and CTO of PingCAP. "The community should be very proud of their abiity to develop such good Open Source software. With the continued efforts of the Apache ShardingSphere community, I am confident of their continued success in the future!"

"Apache ShardingSphere is a good Open Source distributed database middleware solution," said Lixun Peng, Member of MariaDB Foundation, Oracle ACE Director, and Vice President of ACMUG, the All China MySQL User Group. "Open Source is the mainstream of the world's software development. It's nice to see Chinese enterprises and developers become more invested in Open Source. I hope ShardingSphere continues to grow as part of the family of excellent Apache Open Source products."

"The construction and growth of the Apache ShardingSphere community has promoted the impressive development of Open Source products with new options for enterprise IT architecture," said Grace Guo, Sales Director of MySQL. "Congratulations on the graduation of Apache ShardingSphere! Looking forward to building collaboration between Apache ShardingSphere and MySQL communities to provide more diversified solutions for Open Source technologies and enterprises!"

"It's fantastic to see the work of the Apache ShardingSphere community being recognised," said Martin Woodward, Director of Developer Relations at GitHub, "We've been thrilled to see the community grow really well over the past two years with now over 120 direct contributors. This is thanks to the great work of the maintainers welcoming people to their project, with support from the Apache Software Foundation and their mentors. The team have also done a superb job on their documentation with easy-to-understand instructions available in both English and Chinese. Congratulations to everyone involved: a valuable addition for the whole Java community!"

"I'm very glad to hear that ShardingSphere graduated successfully," said Yanwei Zhou, Founder of ArkDB and Chairman of the Open Source database committee of China Computer Industry Association. "Another Open Source database project led by Chinese technology enthusiasts has officially become an Apache Project, which will further promote the development of Open Source database architecture, allowing more and more users to share the benefits of the technology ecosystem. I look forward to it continuing to get better and better."

"Congratulations to ShardingSphere for graduating as an Apache Top Level Project," said Yuchen Zhao, President of Tingyun, "In the past a few years, I've been very excited to see the progress that the ShardingSphere community has made, and expect the project will grow tremendously in the near future and make a deeper impact on database orchestration. As data becomes increasingly crucial for the digital world, Apache ShardingSphere provides an essential set of distributed database middleware solutions and implementations for making IT architecture easier, more robust, and secure. I recommend Apache ShardingSphere to anyone interested in building database solutions on massive and distributed data."

"Since entering the Apache Incubator, the ShardingSphere community has adopted The Apache Way of self-governance and has substantially increased the number of people using, developing, and supporting the project," said Craig Russell, Apache ShardingSphere Incubator Mentor. "The community has worked hard to make several releases under the Apache License and are expanding ShardingSphere’s functionality to meet the needs of the expanding number of Cloud-based enterprises that use the project."

"Apache ShardingSphere is on its way to becoming a standard distributed database solution," added Zhang. "When we were developing our initial architectural features and database dialects, it was clear that we needed contributions beyond those from our small group of dedicated individuals to accomplish the task. Thanks to our growing community, we are pleased to be graduating with our release goals completed. We welcome additional contributors to join the project to further diversify the Apache ShardingSphere community and develop a more flexible and lightweight platform together. It is a pleasure to collaborate with contributors in the open, and promote a fair and friendly atmosphere where we can enrich ShardingSphere and its community the Apache Way."

Catch Apache ShardingSphere in action at ShardingSphere Workshop (Beijing; 18 April 2020), DTCC (Beijing; 4-6 June 2020), and TiD (Beijing; 26-29 July 2020).

Availability and Oversight
Apache ShardingSphere software is released under the Apache License v2.0 and is overseen by a self-selected team of active contributors to the project. A Project Management Committee (PMC) guides the Project's day-to-day operations, including community development and product releases. For downloads, documentation, and ways to become involved with Apache ShardingSphere, visit http://shardingsphere.apache.org/ and https://twitter.com/ShardingSphere  

About the Apache Incubator
The Apache Incubator is the primary entry path for projects and codebases wishing to become part of the efforts at The Apache Software Foundation. Code donations and communities from external organizations and existing external projects enter the ASF through the Incubator to: 1) ensure all donations are in accordance with the ASF legal standards; and 2) develop new communities that adhere to our guiding principles. Incubation is required of all newly accepted projects until a further review indicates that the infrastructure, communications, and decision making process have stabilized in a manner consistent with other successful ASF projects. While incubation status is not necessarily a reflection of the completeness or stability of the code, it does indicate that the project has yet to be fully endorsed by the ASF. For more information, visit http://incubator.apache.org/  

About The Apache Software Foundation (ASF)
Established in 1999, The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) is the world’s largest Open Source foundation, stewarding 200M+ lines of code and providing more than $20B+ worth of software to the public at 100% no cost. The ASF’s all-volunteer community grew from 21 original founders overseeing the Apache HTTP Server to 765 individual Members and 206 Project Management Committees who successfully lead 350+ Apache projects and initiatives in collaboration with 7,600 Committers through the ASF’s meritocratic process known as "The Apache Way". Apache software is integral to nearly every end user computing device, from laptops to tablets to mobile devices across enterprises and mission-critical applications. Apache projects power most of the Internet, manage exabytes of data, execute teraflops of operations, and store billions of objects in virtually every industry. The commercially-friendly and permissive Apache License v2 is an Open Source industry standard, helping launch billion dollar corporations and benefiting countless users worldwide. The ASF is a US 501(c)(3) not-for-profit charitable organization funded by individual donations and corporate sponsors including Aetna, Alibaba Cloud Computing, Amazon Web Services, Anonymous, ARM, Baidu, Bloomberg, Budget Direct, Capital One, CarGurus, Cerner, Cloudera, Comcast, Facebook, Google, Handshake, Huawei, IBM, Indeed, Inspur, Leaseweb, Microsoft, ODPi, Pineapple Fund, Private Internet Access, Red Hat, Target, Tencent, Union Investment, Verizon Media, and Workday. For more information, visit http://apache.org/ and https://twitter.com/TheASF  

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