Today’s global and distributed applications often need to serve user requests from a single data source across different regions. While providing data scaling and protection against network outages, ensuring low-latency access to data is critical for providing a seamless user experience. YugabyteDB, a distributed SQL database, is designed to handle global data workloads efficiently. In this blog post, I’ll share some techniques to optimize read and write latency in a multi-region YugabyteDB cluster.

Modern distributed databases split large tables into tablets to enable parallel processing and efficient data distribution. Finding the right tablet size impacts everything from query performance to operational overhead. Let’s explore how to approach tablet sizing systematically to achieve optimal performance.

Understanding Tablet Impact

Each tablet in your distributed database represents an independent unit of data distribution. When you create tablets, you influence system behavior at multiple levels. The database uses tablets to parallelize operations, manage resources, and handle data growth. Your tablet strategy directly affects query response times, write throughput, and overall system health.