Demo Friday: Erik Brandsberg reviewed the Heimdall Distributed Database Proxy
Tags: database, aws, architecture, techtalks
Published: 2020-06-04 20:37:06

[![Demo Friday: Erik Brandsberg will review the Heimdall Distributed Database Proxy](https://img.youtube.com/vi/w5xDpAtJMvc/0.jpg)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w5xDpAtJMvc "Demo Friday: Erik Brandsberg will review the Heimdall Distributed Database Proxy")
*Click the image above to watch the video on YouTube*

On Friday, May 22nd, [Erik Brandsberg](https://www.linkedin.com/in/erikbrandsberg/), Chief Technical Officer at [Heimdall Data](https://www.heimdalldata.com/), reviewed the Heimdall Distributed Database Proxy (HD).

The Heimdall Distributed Database Proxy is a SQL platform for application developers, database administrators, and infrastructure owners.

Whether on-premise or cloud, Heimdall helps organizations deliver faster, more reliable, and secure content generation.

_Use Cases:_
- **Find Performance Bottlenecks**: Heimdall’s analytics provides complete SQL performance visibility (e.g. slow, redundant queries) and offers recommendations to remediate them. It diagnoses and cures. For deployment there are no application modifications or integration work required for installation.

- **Increase Scale**: Heimdall’s read/write splitting allows customers to make better use of read replicas with ZERO application changes. Heimdall Data is a 5-minute drop-in replacement. Moreover, we guarantee query reads will always have fresh data with our lag detection logic.

- **Maximize Uptime**: Heimdall is application-aware ensuring connection uptime upon a database failover. Why spend resources developing and re-architecting a solution, when you can use Heimdall and install it a matter of minutes.

- **Strengthen Security**: Heimdall provides an added layer of defense, protecting the database from malicious ZERO day attacks. Unlike other solutions, Heimdall’s database firewall does not rely on pattern or signature matching. It is contextual; alerting and filtering SQL queries that are deemed “abnormal”.

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# Heimdall Architecture

Heimdall Data is a distributed Database Proxy that optimizes from an application perspective. It gives users visibility and control over their SQL environment. Our proxy can be installed anywhere: 1) On each application instance, 2) Separate proxy tier, or 3) On the database. We are transparent to the application and database.

**Caching**: Today’s SQL solutions incur data latency from application-database round trips. Caching on the database improves scale, but does not remove the latency. The Heimdall proxy can be deployed as a sidecar process across application instances. This distributed model results in optimal performance and predictive scale.

With Heimdall caching, queries that would have gone to the database are now cached locally on the application tier. You choose the cache of choice (e.g. Amazon Elasticache, Redis) and Heimdall determines which query results to cache and invalidate. Best of all, caching does not require writing a single line of code.

**Read/Write Split**: To scale the database tier horizontally with master and read replicas, applications modifications are required. Heimdall is SQL aware and routes queries to the appropriate database instances (writes or read replicas). As an added benefit, we support replication lag detection to ensure fresh data is always served.

**Automated Failover**: Health checks each database instance. Upon a failure, Heimdall holds the connection as it transitions to the redundant database instance. This results in failovers that are transparent to the application.

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