6 ms·

Realm (YC S11) Announces $20M Series B, 100M Devices After 9 Months

55 points by astigsen 12y ago

pierotofy 12y ago
Congratulations on the funding. But the "the 2nd-most deployed database in the world in less than a year" is a little... I don't know. If a popular app decides to use your database, shouldn't you count that as 1 installation instead of taking the number of people that will download the popular app? The comparison doesn't seem fair for non-mobile databases. I would rewrite it as "the 2nd-most deployed mobile database in the world in less than a year".
- astigsen 12y ago
  Alexander from Realm here. I agree that deployments are not the only (or even nessesarily most interesting) metric of usage. But it is a good example of how remarkable mobile growth is. At this point there are just crazily many more mobile devices out there than there ever was on the backend and server side. It is an interesting metric for us, given that sqlite has for a long time (rightfully) claimed to be the most widely deployed datebase in world, which is also primarily based on their usage on mobile devices.
infofarmer 12y ago
Love their «pricing» page! http://realm.io/pricing/ http://realm.io/pricing/
- comrade1 12y ago
  How do they make money, or plan to make money? Enterprise contracts? Hope to get bought out?
  - ph0rque 12y ago
    Says right there: Realm Inc. already generates revenue by selling additional enterprise products & services around the technology.
zzzhao 12y ago
Congratulations. Anyone in the HN community have experience using Realm that they can share? Would love to hear actual experiences from folks here.
- hobaak 12y ago
  Here is one. https://medium.com/@rutvijshah/why-i-did-not-choose-realm-io-for-my-android-app-f44562af5fb0 https://medium.com/@rutvijshah/why-i-did-not-choose-realm-io...
- GeneralTspoon 12y ago
  I've used it in a couple of small Android apps. Overall, I wouldn't recommend it (yet) for anything more than toy projects. The sibling post mentioned a few reasons why, but here's are another few: No inheritance. No nested transactions. No RxJava support (due to threading issues with Realm). Many annoying random errors (for example, get a row then close the DB connection -> You can't use those results after. Although I believe that this is by design because Realm doesn't cache any data - it queries every time it's requested AFAIK). It's definitely on the way to being an awesome asset, but it's not there yet!
  - brmunk 12y ago
    Yeah we absolutely have a lot of work ahead of us (as mentioned in the post). And the issues you mention are tracked in https://github.com/realm/realm-java/issues https://github.com/realm/realm-java/issues. There you can also see that we got a lot more features we want to add than the few you mention :-) We strive to be very transparent about our limitations (http://realm.io/docs/java/0.80.0/#current-limitations http://realm.io/docs/java/0.80.0/#current-limitations) so that they at least don't surprise anyone. We seriously love to get the feedback so we can prioritize the additional features our users desire the most. That said, we are very encouraged to see that the current features satisfy a lot of "non-toy" apps as well and that many thousands developers are building new apps every week. You can see some of them mentioned here: http://realm.io/users/ http://realm.io/users/, and at the end of that page is also some unedited interviews with developers. /Brian from Realm
- 12y ago
lsb 12y ago
So how does the data storage part work? I literally browsed for ten minutes unable to see how the thing stores the data you give it.
- easytiger 12y ago
  Its so secret they can't even get it to run on j2jre on any computer.
  - Ilios 12y ago
    Christian from Realm here. Actually there is no technical limitation that prevents Realm running on normal java. Our current focus is just on making the best possible mobile developer experience which means that the current API is tightly coupled to the Android API. We do have plans for a pure Java API down the line though.
- Ilios 12y ago
  Realm uses a custom C++ core that is different from SQLite, and we published a bit about the architecture here http://realm.io/news/introducing-realm/#fast http://realm.io/news/introducing-realm/#fast. Both iOS and Android API's are just wrappers around this core.
- brmunk 12y ago
  Hi, Brian from Realm here. Surely hard to find much info about the internals yet. We could and should absolutely share more about that in a blog post. And to be honest we have for a long time wanted to do that, but just prioritized to enhance the features and support people building apps. We will get back on that.
  - lsb 12y ago
    Can you summarize it in a few sentences? It sounds like you've got interesting tech under the hood.
    - Ilios 12y ago

55 points by astigsen 12y ago

Congratulations on the funding. But the "the 2nd-most deployed database in the world in less than a year" is a little... I don't know. If a popular app decides to use your database, shouldn't you count that as 1 installation instead of taking the number of people that will download the popular app? The comparison doesn't seem fair for non-mobile databases. I would rewrite it as "the 2nd-most deployed mobile database in the world in less than a year".

astigsen 12y ago
Alexander from Realm here. I agree that deployments are not the only (or even nessesarily most interesting) metric of usage. But it is a good example of how remarkable mobile growth is. At this point there are just crazily many more mobile devices out there than there ever was on the backend and server side. It is an interesting metric for us, given that sqlite has for a long time (rightfully) claimed to be the most widely deployed datebase in world, which is also primarily based on their usage on mobile devices.

infofarmer 12y ago

Love their «pricing» page! http://realm.io/pricing/ http://realm.io/pricing/

comrade1 12y ago
How do they make money, or plan to make money? Enterprise contracts? Hope to get bought out?
- ph0rque 12y ago
  Says right there: Realm Inc. already generates revenue by selling additional enterprise products & services around the technology.

zzzhao 12y ago

Congratulations. Anyone in the HN community have experience using Realm that they can share? Would love to hear actual experiences from folks here.

hobaak 12y ago
Here is one. https://medium.com/@rutvijshah/why-i-did-not-choose-realm-io-for-my-android-app-f44562af5fb0 https://medium.com/@rutvijshah/why-i-did-not-choose-realm-io...
GeneralTspoon 12y ago
I've used it in a couple of small Android apps. Overall, I wouldn't recommend it (yet) for anything more than toy projects. The sibling post mentioned a few reasons why, but here's are another few: No inheritance. No nested transactions. No RxJava support (due to threading issues with Realm). Many annoying random errors (for example, get a row then close the DB connection -> You can't use those results after. Although I believe that this is by design because Realm doesn't cache any data - it queries every time it's requested AFAIK). It's definitely on the way to being an awesome asset, but it's not there yet!
- brmunk 12y ago
  Yeah we absolutely have a lot of work ahead of us (as mentioned in the post). And the issues you mention are tracked in https://github.com/realm/realm-java/issues https://github.com/realm/realm-java/issues. There you can also see that we got a lot more features we want to add than the few you mention :-) We strive to be very transparent about our limitations (http://realm.io/docs/java/0.80.0/#current-limitations http://realm.io/docs/java/0.80.0/#current-limitations) so that they at least don't surprise anyone. We seriously love to get the feedback so we can prioritize the additional features our users desire the most. That said, we are very encouraged to see that the current features satisfy a lot of "non-toy" apps as well and that many thousands developers are building new apps every week. You can see some of them mentioned here: http://realm.io/users/ http://realm.io/users/, and at the end of that page is also some unedited interviews with developers. /Brian from Realm
12y ago

lsb 12y ago

So how does the data storage part work? I literally browsed for ten minutes unable to see how the thing stores the data you give it.

easytiger 12y ago
Its so secret they can't even get it to run on j2jre on any computer.
- Ilios 12y ago
  Christian from Realm here. Actually there is no technical limitation that prevents Realm running on normal java. Our current focus is just on making the best possible mobile developer experience which means that the current API is tightly coupled to the Android API. We do have plans for a pure Java API down the line though.
Ilios 12y ago
Realm uses a custom C++ core that is different from SQLite, and we published a bit about the architecture here http://realm.io/news/introducing-realm/#fast http://realm.io/news/introducing-realm/#fast. Both iOS and Android API's are just wrappers around this core.
brmunk 12y ago
Hi, Brian from Realm here. Surely hard to find much info about the internals yet. We could and should absolutely share more about that in a blog post. And to be honest we have for a long time wanted to do that, but just prioritized to enhance the features and support people building apps. We will get back on that.
- lsb 12y ago
  Can you summarize it in a few sentences? It sounds like you've got interesting tech under the hood.
  - Ilios 12y ago