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- Hacker News
- The moment a cache becomes load-bearing you have a database again, except it's in RAM, nobody backed it up, and its failure mode is silence.
Article flagged as AI slop.
by grey-area - > using a database engine we built on top of FoundationDB: a distributed key-value store
it would be interesting to see their experiences with using FoundationDB. this feels like a tech that is amazing if only it had more information and practical examples of how to use, leverage and manage it. the client is complicated and needs expertise to use correctly. would love it if there was more info about it all.
by randito - We wrote a bit about using FoundationDB at Tigris: https://www.tigrisdata.com/blog/fdb-krea-talk/by ovaistariq
- Absolutely no mention of Iceberg or Delta Lake, which have had many of the same properties for years. I wonder if they are aware of them, or otherwise why they invented something new.
I generally don't read low-quality AI slop though, so its possible I missed an explanation that didn't contain those key words.
by jeremyjh - There is a simple version of this idea that really resonates with me.
For about a decade, I've been using flat files on disk or object storage for most of my side projects. There's even a python library that handles some of the plumbing for you [1].
If you don't have strong record-level concurrency needs then it's a lot nicer, easier, cheaper than a relational or document database. And if you do need that, you can design your data model around what defines a record.
by jmathai - "The main downside of this is the fact that object storage doesn't have transactions, so you can't make sure that both appending the event and updating the state of the world happen in one atomic unit. We write the state first and the event second, so a process dying in between leaves the state correct and the history missing an entry. Nothing detects that, because detecting it would mean something reads the log and compares it to state, and the entire point is that nothing does. So every entry in the log really happened. What you don't get is a guarantee that everything that happened is in it."
So, they built a thing that pretends to, but does not actually properly handle transactions?
I guess I should be glad they are not a fintech startup...
by shrubble - > Protobuf field names are forever
If you only have binary encoded protos to worry about (which is typical) then you can rename fields.
by tantalor - Along with putting estimated reading times (21 minutes in this case) can authors please start putting estimated writing times?
Did it take 10 seconds of prompting? Or hours of thought, trial error and revision? Especially when asking people to read for 20+ minutes...
by i2km - They should put a Summary section at the top with the raw prompt.by ahknight
- > In practice, when you reach for a database engine you're actually reaching for four basic features: unique constraints, transactions, indices, and history tables.
That might be a very specific assumption. What about serializability? Replication? Materialized views? Procedures? Locking? Access control?
It’s cool to experiment and try new approaches. Neat one here.
Could still end up moving to Postgres.
by agentultra - What about... queries?by thom
- This is frustrating to read. Tigres is built on FoundationDB, but doesn't expose all FoundationDB operations like transactions, range reads, and get mapped range. They go through all sorts of complications to handle these issues, including a database for caching (and they don't consider thundering herd problems).
What if you just ran FoundationDB instead?
by arpinum - Tigris founder here. So part of the reason we do not expose other database like APIs is because we are a S3-compatible store, so anything we expose has to fit into the S3 API semantics.
In our current design we use FDB as our metadata store which is the sort of workload it is really good at.
by ovaistariq - I've occasionally pitched the idea of exposing transactions for object storage based on bucket forking. I think the idea is finally starting to land, but it's a really "out there" usecase that is likely hard to conceptualize until it's usable in some form.by xena
- FoundationDB is only as metadata store.
Also, the database is the last thing you want to re-invent unless your business is explicitly building a db (even then it's best to re-use a db like all the postgresql forks that have existed)
by ddorian43 - > What if you just ran FoundationDB instead?
Would that let you do collaboration blog-posts with another VC-funded startup though?
- Articles like this remind me of that Innovation Tokens article.
Your time and attention is precious as a developer. I'm absolutely sure it's possible to implement uniqueness constraints, transactions, indices, and history yourself, but is that really the most valuable use of your time? There's probably not a need for you to have a unique solution, so you're quite literally just re-inventing something someone already had for not a lot of benefit.
Wouldn't your time be better spent actually solving the problems that whatever you're building is supposed to solve?
by ryanbrunner - You don't write your own libc to talk to the filesystem, do you?
Same vibe here imo. Use zerofs, juicefs. Use picomq, automq, s3stream. Use slatedb. Use lancedb, fusion, tonbo, iceberg, vertex. Use duckdb, data fusion, polars. These systems all natively speak to object storage. Use Qwikwit, rising wave / hummock, greptine mito, use warp stream, neon. Use celld. Over half of the projects here are very specifically about object storage.
Many deal with uniqueness, transactions, indicies. Which is extra impressive because its across machines. Managing data on a box creates a huge array of challenges and difficulties, backup and scaling and HA, etc etc. A huge reason to face object storage head on is that often you are headed towards that fray one way or another, and object storage makes an excellent easy to scale and manage disaggregation layer that keeps your problems from complecting together, is a clear, well known separation point. With an incredible ecosystem around it.
- Development of video games is the final boss of this one.
If you want to kill someone's dream of publishing a game, encourage them to build their own engine from scratch. I cannot think of a more malicious piece of advice given how effective it is, statistically speaking.
The exceptions to this are so incredibly rare. Virtually all of the in-house engine work at indie scale has been replaced by Godot in recent years. It used to be something like 10-11% of studios were in-house fully custom. Now it's probably closer to 1-2% fully custom and 8-10% on Godot. Having a reasonably stable OSS option has removed the last major argument that I am familiar with for simply using what already exists.
by bob1029 - This article doesn’t present much motivation for why you would do this.
To me it reads a bit like, how we built our office without desks: it turns out if you stack two chairs on top of each other, you can balance your laptop on the top and you’ll also have a shelf on the bottom for your things.
by dullcrisp - > This article doesn’t present much motivation for why you would do this.
For those working with databases, it's easy to come up with a bunch of reasons. ORM is a necessary evil when working with RDBMS, as are things like schema migrations that can easily result in loss of data (I.e., dropping columns or tables).
What if all we need is dumping a big old JSON in a container?
This idea is very enticing. The scale of this whole NoSQL thing is pretty telling.
The blog presents a thought provoking question: what if we don't actually need a full-blown database, and instead we only care about things like unique constraints, transactions, indices, and history tables.
What if we only need a subset of those?
- > it turns out if you stack two chairs on top of each other, you can balance your laptop on the top and you’ll also have a shelf on the bottom for your things.
But that sounds kinda unstable and doesn't really provide the full benefits we expect from a...
Oh.
by tdeck