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FoundationDB: A distributed, unbundled, transactional key value store [pdf]

foundationdb.org

41–50 of 103 posts

Re: FoundationDB: A distributed, unbundled, transactional key value store [pdf]

#42

It's unfortunate that they went silent for years after the Apple acquisition. That period was key for database adoption. I have the feeling everybody kind of settled for pgsql.

Those are two completely non overlapping use cases. If you can use pgsql for your problem, you have no business trying to use a distributed key value store instead. That would be at least as dumb as driving screws with a hammer.

Re: FoundationDB: A distributed, unbundled, transactional key value store [pdf]

#43
post #17

This seems like a good place to ask - are there any new and exiting FOSS "application" worth checking out? I recall from the initial publication of the source - there was references to a great sql layer? I don't know if a FOSS work-a-like ever materialized? Other things I'd hoped for was a network filesystem/blob layer, like maybe s3/nfs/webdavfs compatible? What are people building on top of foundationdb today? Ed:…

I’m curious about this as well. Is anyone working on building text search on top of FDB? It’s kind of astounding to me that last time I checked Elasticsearch was still essentially the only game in town.

Re: FoundationDB: A distributed, unbundled, transactional key value store [pdf]

#45
I am pretty sure that the new cloudant transaction/storage engine is also based on foundationDB, which powers a lot of things behind the scenes at ibm. And couchdb 4 with foundationDB storage engine is hopefully not too far out either. Lets see how long this whole transition takes, but i am still hopeful that the mindshare and motivation of apple, snowflake, ibm and apache community will lead to something great.

Re: FoundationDB: A distributed, unbundled, transactional key value store [pdf]

#46
post #17

This seems like a good place to ask - are there any new and exiting FOSS "application" worth checking out? I recall from the initial publication of the source - there was references to a great sql layer? I don't know if a FOSS work-a-like ever materialized? Other things I'd hoped for was a network filesystem/blob layer, like maybe s3/nfs/webdavfs compatible? What are people building on top of foundationdb today? Ed:…

large unstructured blobs and large files are among the things not well suited to foundationdb and couchdb 4 actually reduced supported blob size in the transition to foundationdb. it looks like object/blob storage systems are at the moment rather seperating more from key/value and document storage than growing together. but this is a good thing because the tradeoffs are very different and it allows each system to focus on what it does best. blob stores will hopefully move even more to content addressing and merkle dag similar to git and ipfs.

Re: FoundationDB: A distributed, unbundled, transactional key value store [pdf]

#47
post #43
post #17

This seems like a good place to ask - are there any new and exiting FOSS "application" worth checking out? I recall from the initial publication of the source - there was references to a great sql layer? I don't know if a FOSS work-a-like ever materialized? Other things I'd hoped for was a network filesystem/blob layer, like maybe s3/nfs/webdavfs compatible? What are people building on top of foundationdb today? Ed:…

I’m curious about this as well. Is anyone working on building text search on top of FDB? It’s kind of astounding to me that last time I checked Elasticsearch was still essentially the only game in town.

its pretty hard to catch up with lucene, there is just so much work, features and brainpower in there at this point. as many features of foundationdb such as the transaction guarantees and reliability are not super important for fulltext search i cannot imagine any company even apple or ibm being able to justify that gigantic investment, instead im sure nearly any soluion willcontinue to use lucene under the hood for the forseeable future.

Re: FoundationDB: A distributed, unbundled, transactional key value store [pdf]

#48

It's unfortunate that they went silent for years after the Apple acquisition. That period was key for database adoption. I have the feeling everybody kind of settled for pgsql.

> I have the feeling everybody kind of settled for pgsql.

That's probably because of spending time on this echo chamber.

In reality everyone has likely been staying with the same databases they know and love but just moved to the cloud. It's why now AWS for example offers such a wide variety of databases e.g. MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQL Server, Oracle, MongoDB, Cassandra, Redis.

Re: FoundationDB: A distributed, unbundled, transactional key value store [pdf]

#49
post #42

It's unfortunate that they went silent for years after the Apple acquisition. That period was key for database adoption. I have the feeling everybody kind of settled for pgsql.

Those are two completely non overlapping use cases. If you can use pgsql for your problem, you have no business trying to use a distributed key value store instead. That would be at least as dumb as driving screws with a hammer.

Yeah, but there are quite a few efforts out there to extend PG into a distributed DB of one flavor or another. Some examples are YugabyteDB, CockroachDB, Aurora and Citus. It's a reasonable approach, but it's also reasonable to come at it from the other direction - build a SQL engine on top of a solid distributed key-value store. Contrafactuals are always dicey, but FDB vanishing behind the Apple wall of silence sure didn't help.

Re: FoundationDB: A distributed, unbundled, transactional key value store [pdf]

#50
post #3

I’d love to see a good primer on data models and scenarios that are well suited to FDB.

this is limited by your creativity and willingness to make tradeoffs. the only really general statement i can think of is that the "larger"/"longer" your transactions are, the harder a time you'll have getting it to cooperate with FDB. "small"/"fast" transactions will be easier to fit into its model. (to likely replies: this isn't an absolute, see all the quotes. yes things like redwood will alleviate some of this, b…

IIRC fdb is fully optimistic concurrency control. It doesn't do any locking. If you have workloads which are highly contended, you'll need to do something in the layer above to coordinate. Otherwise, performance will be unbearable.

This may be out-dated, please let me know if the story has evolved here.

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