Realm is a mobile database: an alternative to SQLite and key-value stores
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Re: Realm is a mobile database: an alternative to SQLite and key-value stores
#2The documentation links on the github page are broken; see http://realm.io to find out what it is. (AFAICT it's basically Firebase.)
Re: Realm is a mobile database: an alternative to SQLite and key-value stores
#3Realm has been discussed on HN quite a bit for the past 3 years: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=realm&sort=byPopularity&prefix...
It's been really nice to use so far for me, plus the Realm team puts out a lot of helpful deeper dive blog posts: https://realm.io/news/
Re: Realm is a mobile database: an alternative to SQLite and key-value stores
#4The documentation links on the github page are broken; see http://realm.io to find out what it is. (AFAICT it's basically Firebase.)
There are two products - Realm Mobile Database[0] and Realm Mobile Platform[1].
The former is, as the HN post suggests, basically a database for mobile applications which you can use in place of SQLite or as a key value store.
The latter combines the database software which runs on the mobile devices with the Realm Object Server[2] which runs server side to provide something like Firebase (disclaimer: I've used the Mobile Database but haven't used the Mobile Platform (and Object Server) yet).
[0]: https://realm.io/products/realm-mobile-database/
Re: Realm is a mobile database: an alternative to SQLite and key-value stores
#5The documentation links on the github page are broken; see http://realm.io to find out what it is. (AFAICT it's basically Firebase.)
We're fixing those, but they should be:
https://realm.io/docs/javascript/latest and https://realm.io/docs/javascript/latest/api
Re: Realm is a mobile database: an alternative to SQLite and key-value stores
#6OT: What happened in the database space and why? In 2000 you would have had a hard time naming enough database systems to run out of fingers for counting. But in recent years database system seem to pop out of the ground like JavaScript frameworks.
So what changed? Did the idea of a general purpose database system break because the usage scenarios became so diverse that we can no longer pretend that one size fits almost all? Is this just a perception thing because everybody started uploading his weekend hack toy database to GitHub and blogs about it?
And what really irritates me the most, database systems are really complex pieces of software requiring years and years of development time, where does this time come from and who pays for it? Especially having more and more different databases system to choose from does not really promise that developing yet another one will be an easy commercial success.
Re: Realm is a mobile database: an alternative to SQLite and key-value stores
#7The documentation links on the github page are broken; see http://realm.io to find out what it is. (AFAICT it's basically Firebase.)
No, it's (at least) as easy to use as Firebase, but it's much more powerful. It uses actual objects, not json. It's very close to manipulating normal objects in the language, extremely nice to work with. There are limitations, especially with the syncing, but it's by far the nicest database solution I know of.
Re: Realm is a mobile database: an alternative to SQLite and key-value stores
#8OT: What happened in the database space and why? In 2000 you would have had a hard time naming enough database systems to run out of fingers for counting. But in recent years database system seem to pop out of the ground like JavaScript frameworks. So what changed? Did the idea of a general purpose database system break because the usage scenarios became so diverse that we can no longer pretend that one size fits alm…
Realm has been available for many years and is actually really different from what else is out there by the fact that it is a real object database. It has just been flying under the radar a bit given that it has only been available for mobile devices.
I for one think that it is awesome that it is now available for node.js as well. Especially with the new replication functionality that allows you to share live data between node instances running on different machines.
Re: Realm is a mobile database: an alternative to SQLite and key-value stores
#9I've had some nasty bugs happen in production with Realm, as is expected with any new database store. Newer version seem better in this regard, but if you read the changelogs you might be shocked at how fundamental the fixes can be.
It also times some time getting use to -- my biggest gripe is that the notification API won't tell you what actually has been modified, just that an object changed _somehow_. That makes a pure reactive design quite hard if those changes have non-trivial consequences, and not just a quick re-rendering of some element on the screen.
Looking forward to finding time to go back to SQLite where I can actually do complicated queries, relational joins, triggers, etc on a fast and mature code base.
Re: Realm is a mobile database: an alternative to SQLite and key-value stores
#10I have dabbled a bit with it quite a few times and was quite happy about it, but my main issue is that AFAIK there is not "pure" Java API for Realm.
It seems there have been attempts at removing Android dependencies but it seems they were never finished, meaning you can't have it running on desktop apps.
This is (sadly) a showstopper for me.