RonDB is a high-performance, MySQL-compatible distributed database engineered for real-time, latency-critical workloads. Built on decades of development in the MySQL NDB Cluster—led by the original founder of the NDB product—RonDB extends the NDB storage engine with new capabilities, cloud-native automation, and modern APIs tailored for large-scale AI and online services.

This talk will describe how RonDB consistently delivers 1–4 ms latency even for large batched operations involving hundreds of rows and multi-megabyte payloads, and will explain the architectural techniques that make such performance possible. We will highlight RonDB’s role as the online feature store powering the Hopsworks Real-Time AI platform, deployed in production at companies such as Zalando for personalized recommendations and other low-latency machine-learning applications.

The session will also introduce key components of the RonDB ecosystem:

rondb-helm – Kubernetes and Helm tooling for deploying, managing, and scaling RonDB clusters in cloud environments.

rondb-tools – Scripts and automation utilities for quickly setting up local or distributed RonDB testbeds.

New API layers, including: • A REST API server offering batch key operations, batch scans, and aggregated SQL queries. • An experimental Redis-compatible interface, enabling RonDB to act as a durable, high-throughput backend behind standard Redis commands.

We will outline the active collaboration between the RonDB team and Oracle’s MySQL NDB Cluster engineers, and how RonDB extends and complements the upstream NDB ecosystem. In addition, we will present ongoing cooperation with Datagraph to build a SPARQL interface to RonDB, leveraging Datagraph’s Common Lisp NDB API.

Attendees will come away with a clear understanding of how RonDB achieves its performance characteristics, how it integrates with modern real-time AI pipelines, and how to deploy, operate, and experiment with RonDB using the available open-source tools.

GitHub repositories: https://github.com/logicalclocks/rondb https://github.com/logicalclocks/rond-helm https://github.com/logicalclocks/rondb-tools https://github.com/datagraph/cl-ndbapi/

Web sites of note: https://rondb.com https://docs.rondb.com https://hopsworks.ai https://blog.dydra.com/@datagenous/blog-catalog