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

Show HN: Announcing the FaunaDB Add-On for Netlify

netlify.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 21 posts

Re: Show HN: Announcing the FaunaDB Add-On for Netlify

#11

Post by vosper »

telligent wrote: post #9
vosper wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> FaunaDB a perfect choice for developers who don’t know much about databases And, from the Fauna docs: > Related documents in FaunaDB are stored within classes (also known as collections), which are similar to tables in relational databases, except that the different items in the class are not all required to have the same fields. Typically, classes correspond to types in your application, for example, blog posts, a…

Hey @vosper, thanks for your feedback! To clarify, what we mean by simplicity is making databases as simple to work with as using an API. An example of this is native GraphQL support within FaunaDB. We're continuing to make our database concepts like Collections easier to use and understand. I've made a note to clarify the blog post you are referencing. Collections come from a NoSQL approach, and allow users to chang…

> without having to worry about specifying a schema upfront that may change over time.

Thing is, there's always a schema. Code always expects data to look a particular way. Whether it's written down and enforced by the DB or not will have a great influence on your ability to reason about your system and make changes down the line.

This sounds like the same mistakes of Mongo all over again. Databases that don't require and enforce schemas trade a degree of early flexibility and development speed for a future of confusion, hacks and workarounds, and lower velocity.

Most people who make this tradeoff aren't aware they're making it. The rest of us use RDBMS.

(I get that you work for the company and I don't expect this comment to change anything - except hopefully the mind of someone contemplating using a no-schema database)

Re: Show HN: Announcing the FaunaDB Add-On for Netlify

#13

Post by mariushn »

telligent wrote: post #5

Hi there! I'm Lewis, a PM at Fauna. We built this Add-on so that any developer using FaunaDB and Netlify can come up with an idea and launch it super quickly, by simply focusing on the front-end. If you’re a Netlify user who has never heard of FaunaDB and want to add a database to your app, we’re the only database with a direct Add-on. FaunaDB a perfect choice for developers who don’t know much about databases, or wo…

Hi Lewis, thanks for building this.

Would you please list how FaunaDB is better than https://firebase.google.com/pricing , which some people are already familiar with?

Re: Show HN: Announcing the FaunaDB Add-On for Netlify

#14

Post by evanweaver »

intellix wrote: post #12

Looked at FDB but was instantly thrown off seeing 180ms to Ireland... What do these numbers represent? Is that a single ping, read, write or something else? https://app.fauna.com/status

It's the write transaction latency from that region. Fauna is a global database and data always commits to multiple global regions for durability.

As you can see, the write latency is pretty consistent regardless of source region, unlike databases like Mongo that are homed in a single location and fast from nearby but slower and slower the farther away the client application is.

Re: Show HN: Announcing the FaunaDB Add-On for Netlify

#15

Post by evanweaver »

vosper wrote: post #11
telligent wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey @vosper, thanks for your feedback! To clarify, what we mean by simplicity is making databases as simple to work with as using an API. An example of this is native GraphQL support within FaunaDB. We're continuing to make our database concepts like Collections easier to use and understand. I've made a note to clarify the blog post you are referencing. Collections come from a NoSQL approach, and allow users to chang…

> without having to worry about specifying a schema upfront that may change over time. Thing is, there's always a schema. Code always expects data to look a particular way. Whether it's written down and enforced by the DB or not will have a great influence on your ability to reason about your system and make changes down the line. This sounds like the same mistakes of Mongo all over again. Databases that don't requir…

Optional write-time validations are on the roadmap. FaunaDB does enforce unique constraints via indexes already.

FaunaDB is temporal as well and people don't really enjoy migrating the past, so it has to be a little different than a traditional RDBMS schema. But ultimately it will be more flexible as well.

Re: Show HN: Announcing the FaunaDB Add-On for Netlify

#16

Post by evanweaver »

abhishektwr wrote: post #8

FaunaDB is quite amazing. Someone who have used DynamoDB and Cloud DataStore/FireStore extensively, I find FaunaDB is a lot more flexible to build bigger applications with complex data models. Their GraphQL offering is equally good. It works really well with Lambda. Row-level authorisation and other security features are out of the box. Only thing, which stops us to switch to FaunaDB is the lack of search support. On…

Thank you! Streaming is coming.

Re: Show HN: Announcing the FaunaDB Add-On for Netlify

#18

Post by alittletooraph »

evanweaver wrote: post #14
intellix wrote: post #12

Looked at FDB but was instantly thrown off seeing 180ms to Ireland... What do these numbers represent? Is that a single ping, read, write or something else? https://app.fauna.com/status

It's the write transaction latency from that region. Fauna is a global database and data always commits to multiple global regions for durability. As you can see, the write latency is pretty consistent regardless of source region, unlike databases like Mongo that are homed in a single location and fast from nearby but slower and slower the farther away the client application is.

Mongo addresses this with partitioning and you can distribute partitions which serve local client applications anywhere. The database as a service for Mongo supports 66 regions across AWS, Azure, and GCP so write latency (regardless of where the client application is) doesn't become an issue.

Re: Show HN: Announcing the FaunaDB Add-On for Netlify

#19

Post by evanweaver »

alittletooraph wrote: post #18
evanweaver wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the write transaction latency from that region. Fauna is a global database and data always commits to multiple global regions for durability. As you can see, the write latency is pretty consistent regardless of source region, unlike databases like Mongo that are homed in a single location and fast from nearby but slower and slower the farther away the client application is.

Mongo addresses this with partitioning and you can distribute partitions which serve local client applications anywhere. The database as a service for Mongo supports 66 regions across AWS, Azure, and GCP so write latency (regardless of where the client application is) doesn't become an issue.

It's absolutely an issue when multiple applications or users write to the same data from different locations, or when users move around.

If the application only lives in one place you are paying for the latency to reach the application from the remote client in the first place, even if the latency from the app to the database is "fast".

FaunaDB gives you local-latency reads and minimum global write latency from everywhere.

Post reply on HN