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Nooooo!!!! FoundationDB is too special to relegate to the iCloud back-end. There's nothing else quite like it out there that's publicly available, either comm

by orand 12y ago

Nooooo!!!! FoundationDB is too special to relegate to the iCloud back-end. There's nothing else quite like it out there that's publicly available, either commercial or open-source. This just set the industry back several years. Given that Apple has virtually zero interest in server-side development tools, I highly doubt us civilians will ever see this amazing technology again. :-(

amelius 12y ago
It is a sad example of what capitalism eventually leads to. Instead of having "modular" companies which can interface freely with eachother, we end up having a few opaque MegaCorps with an internal economy.
- dasil003 12y ago
  But capitalism is also what channels the human instinct to survive into productivity. Sure some subset of geeks can be motivated purely by creativity under a communist system, but I'd be dubious that it could overall match the velocity of Silicon Valley's innovation engine even granting the sizable implied waste reduction.
  - cgag 12y ago
    Free people not being able to match the pace of people desperately trying to free themselves from wage slavery doesn't strike me as a great justification of wage slavery. Not that I agree with the premise that capitalism is what drives people to produce things to begin with.
    - logicchains 12y ago
      Are these people trying to desperately free themselves from wage slavery the same people who spend most of their time watching tv, playing games or caring for children nobody forced them to have? If so they don't seem so desperate to me. Generally the people I've met who work hard to develop themselves and develop skills society needs end up doing quite well for themselves, although I admit that as an Australian my experience is probably different from the US. Here we have more socialised education and healthcare, so anyone with motivation can go to college.
      - nickysielicki 12y ago
        Most are born into this society and never consider the notion that things could ever be different.
      - sk5t 12y ago
        It's interesting that you suppose the AU and US results are likely to be different. As an USian I do not perceive that the system very often fails smart, motivated, hardworking people, healthcare and education regimes notwithstanding.
        jsankey 12y ago
        Then how do you explain the low socio-economic mobility in the US? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socio-economic_mobility_in_the_United_States http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socio-economic_mobility_in_the_... The good news is everyone is getting richer (rising tide), the bad news is inequality is increasing and low mobility is nothing to be proud of. Like logicchains I'm Aussie and we fare better at the moment, though we're also starting to head in the wrong direction by these measures.
        lectrick 12y ago
        Isn't your government incredibly conservative at the moment?
        jsankey 12y ago
        Yes it is, and if they get their way I believe it will be a disaster for both equality and long term growth here. They are aiming to move education and health to more of a user pays model (which makes no sense given the evidence worldwide) and continue their party's privatisation-by-stealth in both areas. Fortunately they are not very competent and do not have full control of the parliament, so most of their bills have been blocked by minor parties.
        orthecreedence 12y ago
  - nickysielicki 12y ago
    * 5 million people dead in the Congo, stealing rare minerals and putting them in your iPhone. * Destroying our earth with a pathetically broad plan for stopping (read: we won't). * We're creating technological systems that pose the greatest threat against freedom ever. * We're killing hundreds of thousands in the middle east because they pose threats to our Saudi oil fields. Yay, productivity. What I'm saying here, is that it doesn't have to be this way. Capitalism drives a population to productivity in the same way meth does: destructively.
    - pswenson 12y ago
      alternative?
      - nickysielicki 12y ago
        <actual-advice> I have no good answers for you. If the atrocities above bother you, you can do your part and opt out from the sides of society that requires you to be a part of it. We just need a cultural shift to stop being such consumers. Stop buying a new phone every year, your current one can easily suit you for the next 10 years. Don't buy a new laptop. Start being cognizant of the influences brand names have on you and try to resist them where possible. Most importantly, we need to strengthen unions and support our local coops. Start being aware of where the money you spend ultimately ends up. </actual-advice> <shill> I'm a libertarian, and I use that in the non-US definition of the word, which is to say I'm an anarcho-syndicalist. Unfortunately anarchism is widely regarded as unrealistic, but if it weren't for the Soviets mucking around in Spain in the 30's, it might be a very different story. What is anarchism? Here's how Noam Chomsky, (the same Chomsky you know from your compilers / CS theory course) describes it: """ Well, anarchism is, in my view, basically a kind of tendency in human thought which shows up in different forms in different circumstances, and has some leading characteristics. Primarily it is a tendency that is suspicious and skeptical of domination, authority, and hierarchy. It seeks structures of hierarchy and domination in human life over the whole range, extending from, say, patriarchal families to, say, imperial systems, and it asks whether those systems are justified. It assumes that the burden of proof for anyone in a position of power and authority lies on them. Their authority is not self-justifying. They have to give a reason for it, a justification. And if they can’t justify that authority and power and control, which is the usual case, then the authority ought to be dismantled and replaced by something more free and just. And, as I understand it, anarchy is just that tendency. It takes different forms at different times. Anarcho-syndicalism is a particular variety of anarchism which was concerned primarily, though not solely, but primarily with control over work, over the work place, over production. It took for granted that working people ought to control their own work, its conditions, [that] they ought to control the enterprises in which they work, along with communities, so they should be associated with one another in free associations, and … democracy of that kind should be the foundational elements of a more general free society. And then, you know, ideas are worked out about how exactly that should manifest itself, but I think that is the core of anarcho-syndicalist thinking. I mean it’s not at all the general image that you described — people running around the streets, you know, breaking store windows — but [anarcho-syndicalism] is a conception of a very organized society, but organized from below by direct participation at every level, with as little control and domination as is feasible, maybe none. """ One big misconception is that anarchism means that there should be no laws, and that murderers should be allowed to wander the streets. What a lot of people don't know is that anarchism, just like communism, was also a victim of the propaganda machine that we now call the red scare. I think that a lot of people in tech, who can directly see how open source killed proprietary software, are the people who are most open to the idea this shift can happen. Anyway, that's just my $0.02. If you made it this far into my comment, give this a read: http://www.alternet.org/civil-liberties/noam-chomsky-kind-anarchism-i-believe-and-whats-wrong-libertarians http://www.alternet.org/civil-liberties/noam-chomsky-kind-an... And also read On Anarchism by Chomsky, it's fantastic. </shill>
- logicchains 12y ago
  As opposed to communism, which leads to everything being produced/owned by one entity, the state? I'm sure there are reasonably arguments for communism but I've never heard it asserted that encouraging market competition is one of them.
  - jsankey 12y ago
    False dichotomy. Communism (or whatever approximations of it we've seen) isn't the only alternative. The inherent problem in any case is concentration of power, whether it be in the state or in megacorps.
    - logicchains 12y ago
      What other alternatives are there? Socialism? There are plenty of socialist countries, but I'm not aware of any that would prevent Apple from buying a relatively small company like that behind Foundation. Economic freedom is a scale. On one side, there's 100% freedom of exchange/ownership, pure propertarian capitalism, which doesn't exist on Earth right now. On the other side, there's pure communal communism, which also doesn't exist on Earth right now. If neither extreme nor minimal economic freedom would address the issue, how could some intermediate level do any better?
      - jsankey 12y ago
        The post you responded to pointed to a problem with capitalism, but it hardly follows that this means they'd advocate for communism. More rationally you might suppose that there is some other way to curb failures of capitalism without jumping to other extreme. It is a scale, yes, but there is no reason to expect the best solution is at either end. Let alone the fact that we are only talking about economic freedom now, which is only one of many interacting facets of politics that can't really be isolated.
        logicchains 12y ago
        Whether or not a company is allowed to buy another company is a matter of economic freedom. All other things being equal, the more freedom companies have to buy others, the greatest the level of economic freedom, as freedom to buy is a component of economic freedom. Allowing companies to buy any companies has issues. Not allowing companies to buy other companies also has issues. So how could any intermediate situation not have issues? If it forbids in some cases, it will have some of the problems associated with forbidding. If it allows in some cases, it will have some of the problems associated with lenience.
- wesleyy 12y ago
  Well if we're in an ideal capitalism society, if what foundationDB created was really of such tremendous value, somebody will come along and do the same thing.
  - jsprogrammer 12y ago
    Not if they were able to encumber it with patents.
  - bbulkow 12y ago
    And no one will buy the product, they'll expect awesome for free, and the company will go for a song. Why expect a different outcome the second time?
    - Karunamon 12y ago
      Because people are not rational animals that follow predictable mathematical models. Too many variables to say it'll be the same again.
  - Nullabillity 12y ago
    And then even more work will be pointlessly duplicated.
- Keyframe 12y ago
  Well, that's the nature of capitalism. It naturally and inevitably leads to monopoly without government intervention. That's the primary reason of regulation in capitalism oriented societies.
taf2 12y ago
How does influxdb compare?
- wmf 12y ago
  It doesn't? Time series data is a pretty specific use case.
jamie 12y ago
Worth following the development of cockroachdb https://github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach https://github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach The long term goals of that project seem to align.
- orand 12y ago
  Thanks for the pointer to cockroachdb. The last I'd checked (over a year ago), FoundationDB was the only reasonable option for distributed ACID transactions, so it's good to see something else with the same goals.
- jzelinskie 12y ago
  Coackroach is to Spanner as FoundationDB is to F1
  - spullara 12y ago
    Cockroach and FDBs KV core are very similar. F1 is similar to FDBs SQL layer.
- Altenuvian 12y ago
  Also have a look into HyperDex: http://hyperdex.org/ http://hyperdex.org/
  - justin66 12y ago
    Aren't they doing some kind of goofy open source/proprietary differentiation, just like FoundationDB was doing? It looks like "the full copy of HyperDex Warp" (whatever that means) is what people are expected to pay for.
    - otis_inf 12y ago
      Hyperdex is the result of their ongoing research at Cornell University. They have a commercial spinoff which sells Hyperdex Warp which adds full ACID transactions on hyperdex. So if you don't need full acid transactions, you can use the OSS version, if you want the extra services you have to pay. It's the same with all software, really: to be able to do a large scale project you have to have funding from somewhere, as you need developers full time working on it to fix/write the stuff no-one wants to fix/write. Some OSS projects get this funding indirectly by sponsored developers who work at company X and write OSS code all day for the project (this is what Linux uses). Other projects are funded by VC money, licenses, support contracts or ads. It's not common a large scale OSS project is successful and stays successful without any funding from the outside. Thus, if a piece of software gets its funding by selling licenses (like with Hyperdex Warp), it's the same as with a company getting funding by sponsoring: if the cashflow stops, the show ends. In the case of OSS you can grab the sourcecode at least, but in the end, to successfully maintain that it takes a lot of effort most of the time, as the projects are often large, complex and the internals unknown to the user.
t1m 12y ago
I think Aerospike has a very similar featureset. It is ACID + NoSQL, replicates nicely across multiple data centers, and definitely has a similar/better latency and throughput profile than FoundationDB.
- emp 12y ago
  ACID on a single "record". I am glad they document this openly, so many other DBs try to make it seem like they support ACID transactions in general. From my understanding with FoundationDB, you did something of the form of "begin transaction" "do lots of stuff" "end transaction", and it just worked. I've yet to find another option that can do this.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]

by orand 12y ago

amelius 12y ago

It is a sad example of what capitalism eventually leads to. Instead of having "modular" companies which can interface freely with eachother, we end up having a few opaque MegaCorps with an internal economy.

dasil003 12y ago
But capitalism is also what channels the human instinct to survive into productivity. Sure some subset of geeks can be motivated purely by creativity under a communist system, but I'd be dubious that it could overall match the velocity of Silicon Valley's innovation engine even granting the sizable implied waste reduction.
- cgag 12y ago
  Free people not being able to match the pace of people desperately trying to free themselves from wage slavery doesn't strike me as a great justification of wage slavery. Not that I agree with the premise that capitalism is what drives people to produce things to begin with.
  - logicchains 12y ago
    Are these people trying to desperately free themselves from wage slavery the same people who spend most of their time watching tv, playing games or caring for children nobody forced them to have? If so they don't seem so desperate to me. Generally the people I've met who work hard to develop themselves and develop skills society needs end up doing quite well for themselves, although I admit that as an Australian my experience is probably different from the US. Here we have more socialised education and healthcare, so anyone with motivation can go to college.
    - nickysielicki 12y ago
      Most are born into this society and never consider the notion that things could ever be different.
    - sk5t 12y ago
      It's interesting that you suppose the AU and US results are likely to be different. As an USian I do not perceive that the system very often fails smart, motivated, hardworking people, healthcare and education regimes notwithstanding.
      - jsankey 12y ago
        Then how do you explain the low socio-economic mobility in the US? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socio-economic_mobility_in_the_United_States http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socio-economic_mobility_in_the_... The good news is everyone is getting richer (rising tide), the bad news is inequality is increasing and low mobility is nothing to be proud of. Like logicchains I'm Aussie and we fare better at the moment, though we're also starting to head in the wrong direction by these measures.
        lectrick 12y ago
        Isn't your government incredibly conservative at the moment?
        jsankey 12y ago
        Yes it is, and if they get their way I believe it will be a disaster for both equality and long term growth here. They are aiming to move education and health to more of a user pays model (which makes no sense given the evidence worldwide) and continue their party's privatisation-by-stealth in both areas. Fortunately they are not very competent and do not have full control of the parliament, so most of their bills have been blocked by minor parties.
        orthecreedence 12y ago
- nickysielicki 12y ago
  * 5 million people dead in the Congo, stealing rare minerals and putting them in your iPhone. * Destroying our earth with a pathetically broad plan for stopping (read: we won't). * We're creating technological systems that pose the greatest threat against freedom ever. * We're killing hundreds of thousands in the middle east because they pose threats to our Saudi oil fields. Yay, productivity. What I'm saying here, is that it doesn't have to be this way. Capitalism drives a population to productivity in the same way meth does: destructively.
  - pswenson 12y ago
    alternative?
    - nickysielicki 12y ago
      <actual-advice> I have no good answers for you. If the atrocities above bother you, you can do your part and opt out from the sides of society that requires you to be a part of it. We just need a cultural shift to stop being such consumers. Stop buying a new phone every year, your current one can easily suit you for the next 10 years. Don't buy a new laptop. Start being cognizant of the influences brand names have on you and try to resist them where possible. Most importantly, we need to strengthen unions and support our local coops. Start being aware of where the money you spend ultimately ends up. </actual-advice> <shill> I'm a libertarian, and I use that in the non-US definition of the word, which is to say I'm an anarcho-syndicalist. Unfortunately anarchism is widely regarded as unrealistic, but if it weren't for the Soviets mucking around in Spain in the 30's, it might be a very different story. What is anarchism? Here's how Noam Chomsky, (the same Chomsky you know from your compilers / CS theory course) describes it: """ Well, anarchism is, in my view, basically a kind of tendency in human thought which shows up in different forms in different circumstances, and has some leading characteristics. Primarily it is a tendency that is suspicious and skeptical of domination, authority, and hierarchy. It seeks structures of hierarchy and domination in human life over the whole range, extending from, say, patriarchal families to, say, imperial systems, and it asks whether those systems are justified. It assumes that the burden of proof for anyone in a position of power and authority lies on them. Their authority is not self-justifying. They have to give a reason for it, a justification. And if they can’t justify that authority and power and control, which is the usual case, then the authority ought to be dismantled and replaced by something more free and just. And, as I understand it, anarchy is just that tendency. It takes different forms at different times. Anarcho-syndicalism is a particular variety of anarchism which was concerned primarily, though not solely, but primarily with control over work, over the work place, over production. It took for granted that working people ought to control their own work, its conditions, [that] they ought to control the enterprises in which they work, along with communities, so they should be associated with one another in free associations, and … democracy of that kind should be the foundational elements of a more general free society. And then, you know, ideas are worked out about how exactly that should manifest itself, but I think that is the core of anarcho-syndicalist thinking. I mean it’s not at all the general image that you described — people running around the streets, you know, breaking store windows — but [anarcho-syndicalism] is a conception of a very organized society, but organized from below by direct participation at every level, with as little control and domination as is feasible, maybe none. """ One big misconception is that anarchism means that there should be no laws, and that murderers should be allowed to wander the streets. What a lot of people don't know is that anarchism, just like communism, was also a victim of the propaganda machine that we now call the red scare. I think that a lot of people in tech, who can directly see how open source killed proprietary software, are the people who are most open to the idea this shift can happen. Anyway, that's just my $0.02. If you made it this far into my comment, give this a read: http://www.alternet.org/civil-liberties/noam-chomsky-kind-anarchism-i-believe-and-whats-wrong-libertarians http://www.alternet.org/civil-liberties/noam-chomsky-kind-an... And also read On Anarchism by Chomsky, it's fantastic. </shill>
logicchains 12y ago
As opposed to communism, which leads to everything being produced/owned by one entity, the state? I'm sure there are reasonably arguments for communism but I've never heard it asserted that encouraging market competition is one of them.
- jsankey 12y ago
  False dichotomy. Communism (or whatever approximations of it we've seen) isn't the only alternative. The inherent problem in any case is concentration of power, whether it be in the state or in megacorps.
  - logicchains 12y ago
    What other alternatives are there? Socialism? There are plenty of socialist countries, but I'm not aware of any that would prevent Apple from buying a relatively small company like that behind Foundation. Economic freedom is a scale. On one side, there's 100% freedom of exchange/ownership, pure propertarian capitalism, which doesn't exist on Earth right now. On the other side, there's pure communal communism, which also doesn't exist on Earth right now. If neither extreme nor minimal economic freedom would address the issue, how could some intermediate level do any better?
    - jsankey 12y ago
      The post you responded to pointed to a problem with capitalism, but it hardly follows that this means they'd advocate for communism. More rationally you might suppose that there is some other way to curb failures of capitalism without jumping to other extreme. It is a scale, yes, but there is no reason to expect the best solution is at either end. Let alone the fact that we are only talking about economic freedom now, which is only one of many interacting facets of politics that can't really be isolated.
      - logicchains 12y ago
        Whether or not a company is allowed to buy another company is a matter of economic freedom. All other things being equal, the more freedom companies have to buy others, the greatest the level of economic freedom, as freedom to buy is a component of economic freedom. Allowing companies to buy any companies has issues. Not allowing companies to buy other companies also has issues. So how could any intermediate situation not have issues? If it forbids in some cases, it will have some of the problems associated with forbidding. If it allows in some cases, it will have some of the problems associated with lenience.
wesleyy 12y ago
Well if we're in an ideal capitalism society, if what foundationDB created was really of such tremendous value, somebody will come along and do the same thing.
- jsprogrammer 12y ago
  Not if they were able to encumber it with patents.
- bbulkow 12y ago
  And no one will buy the product, they'll expect awesome for free, and the company will go for a song. Why expect a different outcome the second time?
  - Karunamon 12y ago
    Because people are not rational animals that follow predictable mathematical models. Too many variables to say it'll be the same again.
- Nullabillity 12y ago
  And then even more work will be pointlessly duplicated.
Keyframe 12y ago
Well, that's the nature of capitalism. It naturally and inevitably leads to monopoly without government intervention. That's the primary reason of regulation in capitalism oriented societies.

taf2 12y ago

How does influxdb compare?

wmf 12y ago
It doesn't? Time series data is a pretty specific use case.

jamie 12y ago

Worth following the development of cockroachdb https://github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach https://github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach The long term goals of that project seem to align.

orand 12y ago
Thanks for the pointer to cockroachdb. The last I'd checked (over a year ago), FoundationDB was the only reasonable option for distributed ACID transactions, so it's good to see something else with the same goals.
jzelinskie 12y ago
Coackroach is to Spanner as FoundationDB is to F1
- spullara 12y ago
  Cockroach and FDBs KV core are very similar. F1 is similar to FDBs SQL layer.
Altenuvian 12y ago
Also have a look into HyperDex: http://hyperdex.org/ http://hyperdex.org/
- justin66 12y ago
  Aren't they doing some kind of goofy open source/proprietary differentiation, just like FoundationDB was doing? It looks like "the full copy of HyperDex Warp" (whatever that means) is what people are expected to pay for.
  - otis_inf 12y ago
    Hyperdex is the result of their ongoing research at Cornell University. They have a commercial spinoff which sells Hyperdex Warp which adds full ACID transactions on hyperdex. So if you don't need full acid transactions, you can use the OSS version, if you want the extra services you have to pay. It's the same with all software, really: to be able to do a large scale project you have to have funding from somewhere, as you need developers full time working on it to fix/write the stuff no-one wants to fix/write. Some OSS projects get this funding indirectly by sponsored developers who work at company X and write OSS code all day for the project (this is what Linux uses). Other projects are funded by VC money, licenses, support contracts or ads. It's not common a large scale OSS project is successful and stays successful without any funding from the outside. Thus, if a piece of software gets its funding by selling licenses (like with Hyperdex Warp), it's the same as with a company getting funding by sponsoring: if the cashflow stops, the show ends. In the case of OSS you can grab the sourcecode at least, but in the end, to successfully maintain that it takes a lot of effort most of the time, as the projects are often large, complex and the internals unknown to the user.

t1m 12y ago

I think Aerospike has a very similar featureset. It is ACID + NoSQL, replicates nicely across multiple data centers, and definitely has a similar/better latency and throughput profile than FoundationDB.

emp 12y ago
ACID on a single "record". I am glad they document this openly, so many other DBs try to make it seem like they support ACID transactions in general. From my understanding with FoundationDB, you did something of the form of "begin transaction" "do lots of stuff" "end transaction", and it just worked. I've yet to find another option that can do this.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]