Live data from Hacker News

Announcing SurrealDB 1.0

surrealdb.com

21–30 of 56 posts

Re: Announcing SurrealDB 1.0

#21
post #16

Strong vibes from RethinkDB. I hope SurrealDB will have a different fate, I'm a big big fan of live queries and change feeds and don't like most existing implementations.

This immediately sprung into my mind. Already got bitten by RethinkDB (trusted it too much to do some logic, rewrite was painful), so I’d rather have reasonably easily replaceable third-party components than depend on something unique, especially without any guarantees.

Re: Announcing SurrealDB 1.0

#22

Is there any trick to implement live updates in a scaleable way? In the limit for a naive implementation, every mutation would have to check every subscriber to see if the change is relevant which seems like it would cause large bottlenecks for writes.

Listener callout does not have to be part of the synchronous writes. Say if you keep a changelog, listeners can be asynchronously notified. These checks can be batched and throttled as well to minimize call-outs.

I would suspect this is what Google does with Cloud Firestore.

Re: Announcing SurrealDB 1.0

#23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So if you create schemas on the fly, you cannot? Why would I use such a db?

Right, so could I use it to creat an Airtable clone?

Generating a table schema per airtable spreadsheet sounds like an anti-pattern to me.

Re: Announcing SurrealDB 1.0

#25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, so could I use it to creat an Airtable clone?

Generating a table schema per airtable spreadsheet sounds like an anti-pattern to me.

That being said, I generally agree: I’ve been bitten by enough database products that are some startup’s main product to really trust them. I’d rather use a database that’s either maintained by something like the Apache Foundation (Druid, Pinot, etc.) or one that’s a side project of some big company (FoundationDB) or one that’s been around long enough to be unlikely to surprise us when the team is acquihired.

Re: Announcing SurrealDB 1.0

#26

This feels like satire. and written by someone who should have spent more time studying the history of database systems. > Imagine a world where the majority of your backend logic is seamlessly embedded within the database itself This is not a good idea. It has been done many times and never quite caught on because it is not a good idea. From a security perspective it is a nightmare. Or if you do put all the correct…

> never quite caught on

It was quite normal in 70s 80s and even 90s; all the ms sql, db2, oracle and as400 systems I encountered in those days had all or almost all logic as stored procs. Very large ones.

Re: Announcing SurrealDB 1.0

#27
post #5

Not Open Source (in an OSI way): https://github.com/surrealdb/surrealdb/blob/ed60a35b9b539e1b...

It would indeed be better to state that clearly, then I don’t have to check it (our company has a policy which won’t get this passed).

Re: Announcing SurrealDB 1.0

#28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, so could I use it to creat an Airtable clone?

Generating a table schema per airtable spreadsheet sounds like an anti-pattern to me.

To me it seems like the options for user-defined schema are either push-down the schema (and do one schema per spreadsheet) which lets you take full advantage of your DB's query planner statistics system etc, do an entity-attribute-value table and deal with building your own query planner and collecting your own statistics, or go with a document store and build some kinds of dynamic indexes instead of dynamic table schemas.

Re: Announcing SurrealDB 1.0

#29
post #16

Strong vibes from RethinkDB. I hope SurrealDB will have a different fate, I'm a big big fan of live queries and change feeds and don't like most existing implementations.

Can you give a quick elaboration on what you mean about the fate of RethinkDB? I'm not familiar with it.

Re: Announcing SurrealDB 1.0

#30
post #5

Not Open Source (in an OSI way): https://github.com/surrealdb/surrealdb/blob/ed60a35b9b539e1b...

Is it claiming anywhere to be open source? I've heard an interview with the creators and they seemed pretty open about which aspects where open source and which aspects where shut down? I could be missing something from their branding but I'd rather see projects with non-open source licenses from the beginning that bait-and-switch license change when they want to become profitable. (Although, I'd much rather just see…

> Is it claiming anywhere to be open source?

They have a page on their website where they claim to be "an open source company" (https://surrealdb.com/opensource)

Post reply on HN