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Comment by daviddoran | Hacker News Reader

It seems like a strange thing to provide as a SAAS. Unless you're hosted in the same datacenter, the web latency would surely make the speed of it irrelevant. They mention they're "working on a way for developers to run ThriftDB locally" which might make it worth looking in to. I could see it being useful for some things, certainly, but it wouldn't provide enough benefit as a SAAS to make calls over the web.

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Good point. We decided to make it available as a (free) cloud service just so we could get hacker feedback as quickly as possible. If we had waited until we had a version that was easy to install, it would have taken us a lot more time. If people like it, the plan is to open source it.

I agree getting it ready for "easy" install takes a lot more work than completing the coding. I wonder what feature, or combination of features, is the differentiator here? Maybe it's the speed of search, or the loose document schemas combined with freetext search, the REST API? Some more examples and benchmarks would be interesting, when you find the time :)

The thing that excites us the most is the flexible schema because that can cut down on development time dramatically. The REST API is also optimized for developer happiness.

We're working on some examples and should have them ready soon.

Benchmarking is a good idea but tricky because speed depends on the complexity of the data and the query itself. If you have any recommendations for benchmarks please let me know.

In the future we have plans to add machine learning features to optimize relevancy algorithms automatically but that's still a ways off.

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