Show HN: AllyDB – An in-memory database similar to Redis, built using Elixir

dohnuts1919 | karma 124 | avg karma 6.53 · 2023-02-19 18:38:52

Since this runs on Elixir, what's the advantage of using it over Elixir's inbuilt ETS?

Allyedge | karma 5 | avg karma 0.42 · 2023-02-19 23:35:23

The project uses no dependencies and uses ETS anyways.

I am just handling the harder parts such as persistence by myself, to let the user only worry about writing features instead of reinventing the wheel.

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avinassh | karma 5218 | avg karma 4.27 · 2023-02-20 01:01:56

Hey OP, this is cool!

- What are the reasons you picked Elixir?

- What are you motivations for this project?

- How does the append log persistence work?

- Do you plan on adding clustering support?

- How do you plan to make it fault tolerant?

Here is the link to the roadmap if anyone is interested - https://github.com/Allyedge/allydb#roadmap

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Allyedge | karma 5 | avg karma 0.42 · 2023-02-20 02:37:02

- I was just looking to build a database similar to Redis for practice, and thought Elixir's ETS and OTP would be useful.

- Just learning more about databases while building a Redis alternative.

- It appends operations, the same ones you write to the TCP client and when loading them, just runs those one by one. I will still add some optimizations for e.g. repetitive commands.

- I haven't thought much about it yet, feel free to start a discussion in the GitHub repository to further talk about that.

- Probably not crash the server but return more useful errors and use Elixir's OTP features.

Glad to hear that you liked the project!

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avinassh | karma 5218 | avg karma 4.27 · 2023-02-20 08:35:18

I am working on a DB project [0] too, so I was excited to this!

Thank you for answering my questions, I wish you the best with the project

[0] - https://github.com/avinassh/go-caskdb

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Allyedge | karma 5 | avg karma 0.42 · 2023-02-20 10:45:11

Thanks!

Your project looks very interesting as well.

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re-thc | karma 943 | avg karma 0.92 · 2023-02-20 06:19:56

Sounds like AlloyDB from GCP otherwise interesting project. There's been a few lately. Any benchmarks on how they compare?

Allyedge | karma 5 | avg karma 0.42 · 2023-02-20 07:32:08

The project is not finished yet so I didn't do many benchmarks, but if someone cares enough to write some, I would gladly include them in the project.

My testing gave me really fast writes and deletes (since those are asynchronous), and reads were around 60 nanoseconds per read.

But it depends on the data type and I am planning to add more optimizations, especially with Rust NIFs anyways, so I will wait a bit before actually talking about the pure performance of the DB.

The name is like AlloyDB, yeah, but I use that "prefix" in most my projects so, not much I can do there, haha. :)

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victorbjorklund | karma 896 | avg karma 1.86 · 2023-02-20 12:50:00

Cool. Is it possible to run this inside another elixir app?

Allyedge | karma 5 | avg karma 0.42 · 2023-02-21 00:28:05

Not yet, but I plan to add that ability once the database is a bit more complete, which shouldn't take too long.

LilyFrenchPants | karma 7 | avg karma 0.78 · 2023-02-20 17:04:21

Bad name. Too close to AlloyDB. Cross the Rubicon and rename it.

LFP

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Allyedge | karma 5 | avg karma 0.42 · 2023-02-20 17:13:57

It is true that it is similar, but I like including my username "prefix" in my project names so unless I get a great idea for a name, I plan to keep it the same way.