The commercial database playbook is to sell you the engine, then sell reliability, encryption, and security back to you as premium tiers. SynergyDB builds them into the core — and proves each one the adversarial way: kill the server mid-write, cut a machine off from its peers, present the wrong key, sign in as the wrong user.
SynergyDB can run as a cluster of three servers that agree on every change before it counts as saved. One server leads, the others keep exact copies, and if the leader dies, a survivor takes over automatically with nothing lost. That isn't taken on faith — a live three-server cluster was put through the failure drills that matter.
Everything the engine writes to disk is protected with the same grade of encryption banks use — the data files and the safety journal alike, each block sealed with a unique code so tampering is detectable on read.
Present the wrong key and the engine refuses to open at all — no partial reads, no unencrypted fallback. Test data written under encryption is verifiably absent from every file on disk.
Fifteen consecutive hard-crash cycles while writing encrypted data at full speed: account balances stayed exactly right, transfer records stayed complete, and not one saved record was lost.
Older unencrypted files stay readable after the upgrade, and data becomes encrypted naturally as the engine reorganizes itself over time — turning encryption on is an upgrade, not a migration project.
Rules about which rows a person may see — and which sensitive columns are hidden from them — are enforced in the core engine. The same user sees exactly the same permitted data with the same hidden fields, whether they connect PostgreSQL-style, MySQL-style, or ClickHouse-style.
Every connection type checks credentials against one shared login system and rejects wrong or missing passwords — verified by actively trying to get in without them, not just by reading the code. Create a user once and the account works across all the SQL connections.
Hiding that can't be sidestepped: even a SELECT * — the "just give me everything" query — still comes back with the protected columns hidden. The lazy query gets the same protection as the careful one.
Order-processing workloads — many customers buying at once, records held mid-update, connections dropping at the worst moment — are where databases actually break. SynergyDB runs the industry's classic order-entry stress test as a standing exam, and every finding became a permanent engine improvement.
Orders and their line items are found by direct lookup instead of scanning whole tables — roughly a 20× speedup on the busiest write path, with individual reads answered in a few thousandths of a second.
While one user updates a record, it's briefly held so nobody else can conflict — and if that user's connection dies mid-update, the hold is released in milliseconds instead of jamming everyone behind it.
Simultaneous saves from many users are bundled into a single disk write — 25% more throughput under load with zero change to safety — and old journal files are cleaned up without ever breaking a backup or a point-in-time restore.
3-server clusteringCrash-safe journalBank-grade encryptionPull-the-plug testingPer-user row + column rulesIndustry stress testBatched disk writesBackup-safe cleanup