It's under Apache 2.0 for those curious: https://github.com/apple/foundationdb/blob/master/LICENSE. Also, side note: it looks like this was a private GitHub repository for at least a couple months, since they have pull requests going back for at least that long. I find this interesting, since Apple normally "cleans up" history before open sourcing.
Apple open-sources FoundationDB
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Re: Apple open-sources FoundationDB
#12If this was done years ago it'd be a big deal. Now I worry the competition will make this a non event.
To the best of my knowledge (n.b.: I am not an expert, though I follow this field) there still aren't any direct competitors to the breadth of what FoundationDB can do and do well.
Founder here. To the best of my knowledge, you are correct. ACID is getting thrown around a lot these days, and not being used in its strictest sense.
Re: Apple open-sources FoundationDB
#13This is amazing! Is there a roadmap of what is being worked on or is this mainly a dump of their existing codebase?
From looking at the commit history it seems like this is pretty actively developed.
Re: Apple open-sources FoundationDB
#14Do we know where/how Apple uses FoundationDB in production ?
Re: Apple open-sources FoundationDB
#15I hadn't heard of FoundationDB before, so I did some digging into the features: https://apple.github.io/foundationdb/features.html . It seems to claim ACID transactions with serializable isolation, but also says later on that it uses MVCC, slower clients won't slow down operations, and that it allows true interactive queries. I didn't think an MVCC implementation could provide that level of isolation, and I'm not eve…
I mean, PostgreSQL is MVCC and it clearly supports serializable as an isolation level... have you tried using Google?
Re: Apple open-sources FoundationDB
#16If this was done years ago it'd be a big deal. Now I worry the competition will make this a non event.
To the best of my knowledge (n.b.: I am not an expert, though I follow this field) there still aren't any direct competitors to the breadth of what FoundationDB can do and do well.
Google Spanner? Not OSS, but globally consistent, scalable, and extensively battle tested.
Re: Apple open-sources FoundationDB
#17If this was done years ago it'd be a big deal. Now I worry the competition will make this a non event.
What competition do you feel FoundationDB has that has major traction and no lock-in?
Re: Apple open-sources FoundationDB
#18How does this stack up against HBase and Cassandra, which seem to have gotten traction already in the same areas that FoundationDB seems best suited for?
An interesting fact is that Apple is probably one of the biggest users, if not the biggest user, of Cassandra out there.
Can't speak to HBase, but one thing Cassandra doesn't guarantee is ACID - I've seen some data consistency issues that has arisen from Cassandra in our usage, although it hasn't been a huge problem for us. That difference alone probably brings a lot of value to FoundationDB.
Re: Apple open-sources FoundationDB
#19This is INCREDIBLE news! FoundationDB is the greatest piece of software I’ve ever worked on or used, and an amazing primitive for anybody who’s building distributed systems. The short version is that FDB is a massively scalable and fast transactional distributed database with some of the best testing and fault-tolerance on earth[1]. It’s in widespread production use at Apple and several other major companies. But the…
Sorry if I missed it but can you or someone else please link where the client wire protocol is documented?
Re: Apple open-sources FoundationDB
#20this is amazing and this is huge for us - FoundationDB is one of the fastest most scalable distributed KV stores.