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Comment by endisneigh | Hacker News Reader

I'm so desperate for a SQL database where I can just put it on a bunch of commodity hardware via Docker, connect them up and never worry about this again. Ideally it'd monitor my queries and create indexes for me. pleeeeeeaaaaaaaaaaaassssseeeeeeeeee

/dream

FoundationDB is similar but you have to do so much yourself. It's more or less what I'm describing for a key value store though. Not sure why it's not more popular.

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I am having quite a good time with CockroachDB. It has been mostly set-and-forget, and it auto-balances, and does rolling upgrades pretty smoothly.

Solving performance by mindlessly adding indexes works great as long as you don't have all too much data and have endless RAM.

The index backing the unique constraint on the URL table for my search engine is around 23 Gb. The entire server has 128 Gb of RAM, for comparison.

I am hoping EdgeDB heads this direction to some extent.

FoundationDB is an Apple thing, isn’t it? Might explain why. It feels kinda like they’ve put it out there and it just hasn’t had anyone with a marketing budget to push it along.

It started as a proprietary database. Apple acquired it and then open sourced it eventually.

Didn't it start as an open source database? then apple acquired it and made it close sourced, then open sourced it again after several years.

It is weird that this DB has a good reputation which doesn't match its popularity.

FoundationDB was the first publicly available distributed transactional KV on the market that I can recall. It wasn’t “open” though - always proprietary. They generated a lot of hype and good press for being this NoSQL DB that was all about ACID correctness in the age of “mongo is webscale (by writing to /dev/null)”. They had a demo showing impressive throughout on a low power cluster with no data loss during a power cycle. I think that despite generally impressive tech they had some trouble selling but did end up selling the company to Apple.

No, it was not open source prior to Apple releasing it as Apache 2.0 in April of 2018.

The source was licensed to some people but it wasn’t open source IIRC.

I lamented this exact situation in a post I made last week. I'm with you on this completely.

You probably don't really want that. But not in the way that people didn't want WoW classic.

Can you elaborate on why you say this?

Because it would probably lead to the database doing stuff that you don't want it to do, with no way for you to tell it to do something else.

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