6 ms·

Ask HN: How many of you are running FoundationDB? Are you considering it?

10 points by atdrummond 4y ago

And finally - are there any FoundationDB-as-a-service firms (I haven’t been able to find one) and is this something the FDB user/development community thinks would add value?

noduerme 4y ago
Never heard of it before. The idea of true scalability and ACID-compliance sounds too good to be true, given that every new DB in the last 15 years has sacrificed either atomicity or consistency for scale. There are physical limits. I'm a big fan of foreign keys and read replication, and never went in for stripped down key-pair databases; I like my DB to do the lifting, not my application code, even when it has to be spread out. That said, after so long working out how to scale up existing relational DBs and have them maintain consistency, the idea of doing anything even in my spare time with a new/green technology like this wouldn't be worth the effort unless I had a seriously compelling reason to choose it over battle-tested federated or replicated strategies. The degree to which it would make my life harder probably would override the savings in not having to worry about replication even if I sank the time in and found out it worked 100% as advertised.
- adastra22 4y ago
  FoundationDB isn’t new. It’s nearly 10 years old at this point, very stable, and developed by Apple. It’s pretty much the standard for strongly consistent federated key value data stores.
  - noduerme 4y ago
    "Pretty much the standard"? uh... again I have not dug into this at all, but it doesn't look SQL compliant and I would have no idea what limitations I was up against in terms of consistency, locks, foreign key relations, etc. I didn't know it was developed by Apple (but that's definitely not a sales pitch for channeling outside resources into something; so was Objective C, and no one on earth would have ever used it if it weren't required at a certain point to build iOS native apps)
    - atdrummond 4y ago
      FWIW Apple acquired the firm, so the "built for Apple/Mac OS X" peculiarities aren't there.
    - karmakaze 4y ago
      > Objective C was the choice of some very bright folks at NeXT. It's also where all the NSThing (NS is NeXTSTEP) and *Kit naming patterns come from.
    - adastra22 4y ago
      FoundationDB's not a SQL DBMS. It's an ordered key-value datastore with a shared-nothing architecture. Totally different application domain. It wasn't developed by Apple, but Apple did acquire the company that developed it, and they've open sourced it and done a good job of maintaining it. Apple clearly uses FoundationDB inside their production hosting environment, although I don't know if exact details are known. The point is it is stable and reliable enough to power things like the iOS App Store backend (we think--there's a bit of guess work as to how they use it internally).
bjconlan 4y ago
It was earmarked as the new couchdb backend but from the looks of things these efforts have stalled. I should review the technical issues that were discovered as it felt like a good direction based on comments read across related hn comments. (After a quick google I found https://lists.apache.org/thread/9gby4nr209qc4dzf2hh6xqb0cn1439b7 https://lists.apache.org/thread/9gby4nr209qc4dzf2hh6xqb0cn14... which provides some high level details)

10 points by atdrummond 4y ago

And finally - are there any FoundationDB-as-a-service firms (I haven’t been able to find one) and is this something the FDB user/development community thinks would add value?

noduerme 4y ago

Never heard of it before. The idea of true scalability and ACID-compliance sounds too good to be true, given that every new DB in the last 15 years has sacrificed either atomicity or consistency for scale. There are physical limits. I'm a big fan of foreign keys and read replication, and never went in for stripped down key-pair databases; I like my DB to do the lifting, not my application code, even when it has to be spread out. That said, after so long working out how to scale up existing relational DBs and have them maintain consistency, the idea of doing anything even in my spare time with a new/green technology like this wouldn't be worth the effort unless I had a seriously compelling reason to choose it over battle-tested federated or replicated strategies. The degree to which it would make my life harder probably would override the savings in not having to worry about replication even if I sank the time in and found out it worked 100% as advertised.

adastra22 4y ago
FoundationDB isn’t new. It’s nearly 10 years old at this point, very stable, and developed by Apple. It’s pretty much the standard for strongly consistent federated key value data stores.
- noduerme 4y ago
  "Pretty much the standard"? uh... again I have not dug into this at all, but it doesn't look SQL compliant and I would have no idea what limitations I was up against in terms of consistency, locks, foreign key relations, etc. I didn't know it was developed by Apple (but that's definitely not a sales pitch for channeling outside resources into something; so was Objective C, and no one on earth would have ever used it if it weren't required at a certain point to build iOS native apps)
  - atdrummond 4y ago
    FWIW Apple acquired the firm, so the "built for Apple/Mac OS X" peculiarities aren't there.
  - karmakaze 4y ago
    > Objective C was the choice of some very bright folks at NeXT. It's also where all the NSThing (NS is NeXTSTEP) and *Kit naming patterns come from.
  - adastra22 4y ago
    FoundationDB's not a SQL DBMS. It's an ordered key-value datastore with a shared-nothing architecture. Totally different application domain. It wasn't developed by Apple, but Apple did acquire the company that developed it, and they've open sourced it and done a good job of maintaining it. Apple clearly uses FoundationDB inside their production hosting environment, although I don't know if exact details are known. The point is it is stable and reliable enough to power things like the iOS App Store backend (we think--there's a bit of guess work as to how they use it internally).

bjconlan 4y ago

It was earmarked as the new couchdb backend but from the looks of things these efforts have stalled. I should review the technical issues that were discovered as it felt like a good direction based on comments read across related hn comments. (After a quick google I found https://lists.apache.org/thread/9gby4nr209qc4dzf2hh6xqb0cn1439b7 https://lists.apache.org/thread/9gby4nr209qc4dzf2hh6xqb0cn14... which provides some high level details)