FoundationDB's not a SQL DBMS. It's an ordered key-value datastore with a shared-nothing architecture. Totally different application domain.
It wasn't developed by Apple, but Apple did acquire the company that developed it, and they've open sourced it and done a good job of maintaining it. Apple clearly uses FoundationDB inside their production hosting environment, although I don't know if exact details are known. The point is it is stable and reliable enough to power things like the iOS App Store backend (we think--there's a bit of guess work as to how they use it internally).
Well, since we're exchanging unsubstantiated rumors: from what I have heard it's exactly the opposite. FoundationDB is being used for transactional data and works very well. Its active development by Apple would seem to confirm that.
Already playing with it but FoundationDB is used for production Petabyte scale deployments, and the whole deterministic simulation thing for testing is really reassuring as far as bugs/stability. I am guessing with Apple's resources that approach was taken to a whole new level after the acquisition?
So, database experts , what was specific about foundationDB ? Why apple chose this one ? There is planty of [a-bA-B]+DB's out there. Why this one ? , Sry I dont know anything about databases , But I would love to know about them.
FoundationDB excites a lot of people because it's an extremely scalable and extremely reliable distributed database that supports ACID transactions, and which is both open-source and has Apple standing behind it. And yeah, all of that is pretty nice.
But arguably the real power comes from the fact that it exposes a relatively low-level data model that can then be wrapped in one or more stateless "layers". All of these layers write to the same storage substrate, so you can have your document database, your SQL database, your time-series database, your consensus/coordination store, your distributed task queue, etc., etc., but you're only actually operating one stateful system. Your SREs will thank you.
Writing these layers to be scalable and high-performance can be challenging, but it looks like Apple is actively doing it and willing to release the results to the rest of us. This also suggests that their previous open-sourcing of the MongoDB-compatible document layer wasn't a one-off fluke. All of this is very good news for everybody who needs to run databases in the real world.
Full disclosure: I worked on FoundationDB a long, long time ago.
FoundationDB isn’t new. It’s nearly 10 years old at this point, very stable, and developed by Apple. It’s pretty much the standard for strongly consistent federated key value data stores.
reply