so, now i think it's... a MongoDB competitor? maybe?
At the core of it, it is a transactional document database that uses FoundationDB under the hood for data persistence. It automatically provides search capability on the data stored (similar to Elasticsearch) without you having to pipe data to Elasticsearch. Then there is event streaming capability that is also provided out-of-the box, so you can use simple publish/subscribe APIs to build event-driven applications without having to introduce Kafka.
A better comparison would be against MongoDB Atlas. Here are some of the ways it is differentiated from Atlas: - Open source that you can deploy anywhere, the only requirement being Kubernetes. Whether it is your cloud environment or on-prem, it doesn't matter. - Much simpler API interface as compared to MongoDB with native support for HTTP enabling it to be used from anywhere where HTTP is accessible - edge, mobile, etc. - Built with strong transactional consistency guarantee (strict serializability) - this is the benefit of using FoundationDB for data persistence. - MongoDB Atlas is based on 10 years old architecture and the industry has evolved quite a bit thanks to the cloud. Tigris has a micro-service based architecture with separately deployed components (compute, storage, indexing) that can each be scaled independently. - True serverless experience, which is of course possible through a modern architecture. - Automatic indexing, so you don't spend time optimizing queries and secondary indexes.