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SurrealDB: Distributed document-graph database for the realtime web

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Re: SurrealDB: Distributed document-graph database for the realtime web

#41
post #27

Thanks for posting this dragonsh! I am Jaime, Founder of SurrealDB with my brother Tobie. Just the two of us at the moment but we have some some really big things planned for the database. Any feedback is really welcome! More info and can be found on a previous Hacker News post here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32550543 Fireship has made two fantastic videos about SurrealDB https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C7W…

Hey! I see you mention graph relations, and was wondering if it would be possible to use SurrealDb to store data about eg people and events and query the database to retrieve "proximity" out of that data, ie number of "hops" between two or more people.

Coukd you elaborate on that or point me to the right direction?

Thanks!

Re: SurrealDB: Distributed document-graph database for the realtime web

#42

Looking through the SurrealDB website and marketing copy, I can’t help but be a little bit skeptical of the feature set [1]. Many, many smart people have burned many millions of dollars and thousands of man hours building databases claiming far fewer capabilities. Don’t get me wrong though, it would be a really awesome product with my dream feature set if they can actually pull it off. I wish them the best of luck an…

> Many,many smart people… True and if you look inside the code you can see the stated features are a result of underlying engine from those smart people (TiKV [0] in C and rust from pingcap). Surrealdb is standing on shoulders of giants at present, they are TiKV, FoundationDB and rocksdb. The feature set they mentioned mostly coming from TiKV at present. [0] https://tikv.org/

I think TiKV is pure Rust no?

Re: SurrealDB: Distributed document-graph database for the realtime web

#43
post #37
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like this project ... but the functionality you are describing sounds like something that Postgres LISTEN/NOTIFY offers.

The value here comes from the database being able to service the websocket itself, if I read this right. So you don't have to do this in your application.

I see. I would be curious to see how that actually works out in a live environment at scale.

Not so much whether the code will be performant enough to service concurrent websocket requests, but other operational concerns such as, websocket balancing across the cluster, authentication and access logs, failure modes, or usage isolation, just to name a few things off the top of my head.

Re: SurrealDB: Distributed document-graph database for the realtime web

#44
post #27

Thanks for posting this dragonsh! I am Jaime, Founder of SurrealDB with my brother Tobie. Just the two of us at the moment but we have some some really big things planned for the database. Any feedback is really welcome! More info and can be found on a previous Hacker News post here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32550543 Fireship has made two fantastic videos about SurrealDB https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C7W…

Hi Jaime, this is my first time hearing about SurrealDB and it looks awesome! Do you have any documentation outlining the system architecture and how it works under the hood? Thanks for the great work!

Re: SurrealDB: Distributed document-graph database for the realtime web

#45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Many,many smart people… True and if you look inside the code you can see the stated features are a result of underlying engine from those smart people (TiKV [0] in C and rust from pingcap). Surrealdb is standing on shoulders of giants at present, they are TiKV, FoundationDB and rocksdb. The feature set they mentioned mostly coming from TiKV at present. [0] https://tikv.org/

I think TiKV is pure Rust no?

TiKV is written in rust but then it depends on crates which use C and libc. Rust complements C, it is not an alternative to C, just another alternative to C++.

May be 20-30 years down the line, if it stays may be enough OS and libraries are built in native Rust without C then it might displace it, but at the moment Rust depends on C.

Re: SurrealDB: Distributed document-graph database for the realtime web

#46
This sounds like great work; been playing with graph dbs lately and it makes things easier. I was hoping though that there would be an effortless offline component to it though; maybe I missed it but there seems to be none? We have been trying to find a replacement for couch/pouch which gives the same convenience as that combo (besides setting up the right filters and permissions, everything works automatically). I see many people rolling (usually very hacky ‘cache invalidation’) solutions which require a lot of domain knowledge where pouch just works and querying server and client (mostly) the same way also lightens the load a lot. Couch is old and works very well, but, besides being very good at synching, it has a lot of downsides which we just ignored (which worked for us for a decade and very well at that), but with we are not good with couch (erlang) as rust/go/ts team and with the advances in webasm and anything-to-js, as well as having bucketloads of memory and storage on most non-iot (but even some of those if done with care) edge devices these days, you would think there would be a solution that allows me to do this outside couch/pouch. Of course here I forget to mention; although we would not mind paying for it, it needs to have an actual OSS license (not open core but apache/mit/bsd or whatnot). And yes, we might have a go at it ourselves but we are swamped at the moment.

Edit; the project has ‘eventual FOSS’ which I like as a concept and thought of doing myself; put milestones in place which can be externally verified which will trigger the license of the (semi) closed product to become fully foss.

Re: SurrealDB: Distributed document-graph database for the realtime web

#47
post #30
post #7

Business source license. Free for personal or commercial use. But service providers have to pay if they offer this database as a service.

Not ideal, but doesn't seem entirely terrible either

Not terrible but I think it should have a clause that if they stop supporting it (go out of business) it drops to apache or something. Their call of course; not for anyone else to say.

We would use it like this but would need to sign a contract somewhere that if support stops, it would, at least for us, drop away that requirement, maybe for a final lumpsum.

Edit; never mind, they already have such a clause! Nice one.

Re: SurrealDB: Distributed document-graph database for the realtime web

#48
post #7

Business source license. Free for personal or commercial use. But service providers have to pay if they offer this database as a service.

Eventually open source is something I really do like, but it should have clear, measurable and open milestones for doing so. Like Open Accounting to show ‘if we reach 100k’ or something like that. Or if we reach 1000 contributors or if we reach 50k in donations. One thing bloody ETH would be useful for; it would be impossible to hide and you cannot change your mind on when the switch flips.

Re: SurrealDB: Distributed document-graph database for the realtime web

#49
That's a hell lot of buzzwords (GPT-3 trained with HN titles, eh?). Does "serverless" and "cloud-native" database together even make any sense? Idk, but I feel like these folks are doing too much pointless marketing when the core product literally just "borrows" code from other databases without any credit to them.

Came across this rather interesting issue on their own repo: https://github.com/surrealdb/surrealdb/issues/103

I think it's time we say "Stable Diffusion Powered Hyperfast Scalable Ultimate Cloud-Native Kubernetes Native Document Graph Relational NewNoSQL Database"

Enough of the buzzwords on HN, honestly. Also, NOT FOSS.

Re: SurrealDB: Distributed document-graph database for the realtime web

#50
post #7

Business source license. Free for personal or commercial use. But service providers have to pay if they offer this database as a service.

Eventually open source is something I really do like, but it should have clear, measurable and open milestones for doing so. Like Open Accounting to show ‘if we reach 100k’ or something like that. Or if we reach 1000 contributors or if we reach 50k in donations. One thing bloody ETH would be useful for; it would be impossible to hide and you cannot change your mind on when the switch flips.

It’s all there in the license: https://github.com/surrealdb/surrealdb/blob/main/LICENSE. It reverts to Apache-2.0 after four years of the release of a particular version, or on 2026-01-01, whichever comes first.

(This means that if the Change Date is not altered before then, none of SurrealDB will be BSL any more come 2026.)

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