Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Show HN: Noms – A new decentralized database based on ideas from Git

medium.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 180 posts

Re: Show HN: Noms – A new decentralized database based on ideas from Git

#51

Post by jrsnyder »

aboodman wrote: post #18
pinko wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another question to help me better understand the tool: who do you see as your competitors, technically? What do you see as viable alternatives to Noms, but worse? (Or better!) I do see that you were inspired by git, but clearly your use-cases are different.

Git is a competitor. It is fairly common to check data (e.g., csv or json files) into Git today. However, this falls down pretty rapidly. In order to get reasonable diffs, the data has to be sorted, and line-oriented. Also Git just doesn't scale well to larger repos or individual objects. Otherwise, we see the competitors as the way that people distribute data today - custom APIs, zip files full of CSV, etc.

How would you say Noms compares to Datomic[1]? Both projects are working on the same idea of representing a database as tree of commits over time.

From my quick inspection, it looks like Noms shows some focus towards working in multiple branches, whereas Datomic, at least in its marketing materials, just talks about preserving a single timeline.

[1]: http://www.datomic.com/benefits.html

Re: Show HN: Noms – A new decentralized database based on ideas from Git

#52

Post by spotman »

spotman wrote: post #50
tlb wrote: post #34

Strawman marketing alert: "The most common way to share data today is to post CSV files on a website". Maybe there are a bunch of people that still do that somewhere, but if so, they ain't early adopters of decentralized database technology and so not your target customers. It's always better to talk about what your most likely customers are doing now.

Yea and then a paragraph about git under it, made me double take to think maybe they meant CVS, but then realized they really did mean CSV. If this is supposed to replace CSV cool, but there is a lot of ways to cross that bridge. Curious however, what the target use case is. Is it a format, or a database , or both?

After more reading it kind of sounds likes better couch db?

And cool if so, but the CSV analogy is really confusing.

When I think of CSV I think of a ghetto data exchange format that I can send or receive to a less technical person. As I understand nom, it does not sound like its for non technical people.

Re: Show HN: Noms – A new decentralized database based on ideas from Git

#53

Post by fizzbatter »

hibbelig wrote: post #48
fizzbatter wrote: post #37

This is really interesting! What are some ideal use cases for the current implementation? I've seen Git is considered a competitor, but Noms also appears to be a generic database, so i would just like to hear some basic use cases, if possible. Eg: If used as a database, what applications would benefit from Noms? Could/should this be used for personal storage? Could/should this be used for code versioning (ie, Git)?

The way I read it, git is not a competitor but rather an inspiration. They are taking ideas from git to apply them to a different domain.

Fwiw, i was referring to this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12212276

The author explicitly says Git is a competitor

Re: Show HN: Noms – A new decentralized database based on ideas from Git

#54

Post by 2bitencryption »

zphds wrote: post #49

Going through the SDK docs, why was a scheme like ' http://localhost:8000::people' chosen instead of the plain old ' http://localhost:8000/people' ? Are there any benefits? If yes, curious to know what they are.

Perhaps they were writing so much in Go that they set the '/' key to shortcut to '::'.

...but yeah, I am also curious.

Re: Show HN: Noms – A new decentralized database based on ideas from Git

#55

Post by 2bitencryption »

paxcoder wrote: post #47

Pretty impressive work but seems like reinventing wheels. Why wasn't it built upon existing tech? I think the docs should enumerate the most important differences and use cases for which it should be a better fit.

To play devil's advocate, Git "reinvented the wheel," but it was a much nicer wheel.

Not saying this is to databases what Git was to versioning, but there's a reason to strive for that.

Re: Show HN: Noms – A new decentralized database based on ideas from Git

#56

Post by fizzbatter »

daveloyall wrote: post #22
bra-ket wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

does noms understand sql and can it do joins?

It doesn't support queries. It's a datastore, not a database. This is from their FAQ. https://github.com/attic-labs/noms/blob/master/doc/faq.md

I mean, by their definition it is a database, but i can understand your usage. Then again, they both say it is a database, and in your link, they say it "isn't quite there yet", so /shrug heh.

Re: Show HN: Noms – A new decentralized database based on ideas from Git

#57

Post by napoleond »

tlb wrote: post #34

Strawman marketing alert: "The most common way to share data today is to post CSV files on a website". Maybe there are a bunch of people that still do that somewhere, but if so, they ain't early adopters of decentralized database technology and so not your target customers. It's always better to talk about what your most likely customers are doing now.

Is it possible that their target market is not current users of decentralized DBs?

At first glance, it strikes me as a solution for people storing something like scientific data sets rather than application data. In which case, posting CSV files on a website is pretty much best-case scenario.

EDIT: Although, in the "scientific data set" scenario, I'm not sure how much value there would be in storing version history.

Re: Show HN: Noms – A new decentralized database based on ideas from Git

#59

Post by was_boring »

It's an interesting idea.

The HN title suggested it's a database, which made me really curious as I can finally stop using history tables (or wal logging, or the other myriad ways of seeing a point in time). However, that doesn't seem to be the case here?

That said, the idea of "git as a datastore" does seem akin to "blockchain as data verification". Combine those two ideas together, get PWC involved and you have multimillion dollar deals coming in for audit protection.

Post reply on HN