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FoundationDB Record Layer

foundationdb.org

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Re: FoundationDB Record Layer

#61

Post by mcintyre1994 »

georgewfraser wrote: post #39

Seeing this soon after the AWS “wire compatible with Mongo” kerfuffle, it makes me think: it would be amazing if the cloud vendors would offer a managed FDB service. An open-source, cloud-agnostic, horizontally scalable, document-oriented transactional database would be an incredible tool. I know AWS is going in the opposite direction these days with proprietary “wire compatible” services but a guy can dream...

It superficially sounds a bit like Azure's CosmoDB - they say that'll scale horizontally as much as you need, it's document-oriented, ACID transactions, with SQL, Mongo and graph APIs. Obviously lacking badly the open-source and cloud-agnostic. I wonder if there's a world where Microsoft and Apple could work together to standardise something cloud-agnostic based on the best of both.

Re: FoundationDB Record Layer

#62

Post by akavel »

Can someone please ELI5/executive summary to me what are the benefits of FoundationDB? Assuming I know the basics of PostgreSQL and ElasticSearch? I see some hype around it, but I can't understand what's the breakthrough. As a helping question: can you maybe try to tell me who are the expected users of it, vs. PSQL, ES? Or, when I should choose it over them? Also, what are its disadvantages? (I suspect bigger complexity, and bigger cost/worse effectiveness at small scale?) TIA!

Re: FoundationDB Record Layer

#63

Post by misframer »

ryanworl wrote: post #40
continuations wrote: post #38

Does that mean FDB now supports secondary indexes? If that's the case, how does FDB compare to ScyllaDB now that they both have secondary indexes?

FDB does not automatically index your data, but you can write a layer (like this one) to index your data. In a transaction, you write a key like “users/1” with a value of “bob” and then write another key like “users/bob/1” with no value. Then you can do a range scan over the prefix “users/bob/“ and find all the primary keys. After that you do individual gets for the keys in the PK index to retrieve the full record if…

I wrote a blog post on how to implement secondary indexes using an ordered key-value store a couple of years ago: https://misfra.me/2017/01/18/how-to-implement-secondary-inde...

It would work with FoundationDB, RocksDB, etc. I actually learned these techniques when I interned at FoundationDB but have used them the most with other K-V systems.

Re: FoundationDB Record Layer

#64

Post by ascagnel_ »

abalone wrote: post #49

Apple low key does some cool server projects with a Java bent. They've contributed to Netty (well, they hired core developers).[1] They've been basically put them to work reimplementing it in Swift.[2] It's open and out there but not a lot of people paying attention. While it's still early days I think there may a year where, suddenly, Swift on the server is a super serious thing and all this work they've been doing…

Apple is probably hoping to run Swift on their servers. I don't foresee them putting in the effort into enterprise sales and service to make Swift overtake Java, though -- it hasn't really been their MO in the past.

Re: FoundationDB Record Layer

#65

Post by [deleted] »

aseipp wrote: post #58
jwr wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cassandra To be honest, I don't like anything about Cassandra. Beginning with the naming: back when I was trying to learn about Cassandra, I couldn't get past the obscure and bizarre naming (super-columns?). When I dealt with systems using it, I never quite understood how you can keep saying that "the later timestamp wins" and speak of consistency with a straight face: in a distributed system, there is no such thing…

FoundationDB does not support true geo-replicated multi-region distribution the way Cassandra, Spanner, Cockroach, etc do, at least not without paying huge latency/round trip costs. If you want to avoid that, the best you can have is a separate failover region, and, with FoundationDB 6, you can get closer-to-LAN latencies for failover deployments to separate regions (but only one region) while retaining ACID semantic…

[deleted]

Re: FoundationDB Record Layer

#66

Post by dominotw »

akavel wrote: post #62

Can someone please ELI5/executive summary to me what are the benefits of FoundationDB? Assuming I know the basics of PostgreSQL and ElasticSearch? I see some hype around it, but I can't understand what's the breakthrough. As a helping question: can you maybe try to tell me who are the expected users of it, vs. PSQL, ES? Or, when I should choose it over them? Also, what are its disadvantages? (I suspect bigger complex…

Its a distributed acid k/v layer that other models can be built on top of.

So you can build PostgreSQL, ElasticSearch on top of the foundationDB.

Re: FoundationDB Record Layer

#67

Post by mnutt »

_y4bi wrote: post #9
jwr wrote: post #7

Very interesting. I've been looking closely at FoundationDB as a way forward (to replace RethinkDB and Cassandra in existing systems). It's one of the few contenders for a really interesting take on a distributed database. I am not sure if I will use the record layer (I've been planning to write "my layer" myself), but it will definitely be an interesting thing to look at.

Fellow RethinkDB user here. I’ve been looking at Cassandra and FoundationDB as replacements. I’m genuinely curious— what didn’t you like about Cassandra?

If you’re considering Cassandra, it’s probably also worth considering Scylla. It’s a drop-in replacement for Cassandra so shares some of its flaws, but is considerably more pleasant to run in production.

Re: FoundationDB Record Layer

#68

Post by [deleted] »

georgewfraser wrote: post #39

Seeing this soon after the AWS “wire compatible with Mongo” kerfuffle, it makes me think: it would be amazing if the cloud vendors would offer a managed FDB service. An open-source, cloud-agnostic, horizontally scalable, document-oriented transactional database would be an incredible tool. I know AWS is going in the opposite direction these days with proprietary “wire compatible” services but a guy can dream...

[deleted]

Re: FoundationDB Record Layer

#69

Post by pier25 »

So why would Apple be doing this now? Maybe preparing the terrain to enter the cloud space and compete with Azure and AWS in a couple of years?

After all, it's no mystery Apple wants to expand their services revenue. Their hardware revenue it's not growing as much as it used to.

Re: FoundationDB Record Layer

#70

Post by manigandham »

jwr wrote: post #33
_y4bi wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fellow RethinkDB user here. I’ve been looking at Cassandra and FoundationDB as replacements. I’m genuinely curious— what didn’t you like about Cassandra?

Cassandra To be honest, I don't like anything about Cassandra. Beginning with the naming: back when I was trying to learn about Cassandra, I couldn't get past the obscure and bizarre naming (super-columns?). When I dealt with systems using it, I never quite understood how you can keep saying that "the later timestamp wins" and speak of consistency with a straight face: in a distributed system, there is no such thing…

There is nothing else open-source that does multi-region active/active clusters like Cassandra/Scylla.

The rest either have a single cluster that can try to be stretched (usually with bad results or incredibly high latency) or is an enterprise feature using complicated log-shipping to apply updates everywhere.

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