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Comment by monstrado | Hacker News Reader

I leveraged FoundationDB and RecordLayer to build a transactional catalog system for all our data services at a previous company, and it was honestly just an amazing piece of software. Adding gRPC into the mix for the serving layer felt so natural since schemas / records are defined using Protobuf with RecordLayer.

The only real downside is that the onramp for running FoundationDB at scale is quite a bit higher than a traditional distributed database.

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Sounds cool. Any write up on this? How did you approach the design? What was the motivation to use foundation db? How much did you/your team needed to learn while doing it?

No write up, but the main reason was reusing the existing database we were comfortable deploying at the time. We were already using FDB for an online aggregation / mutation store for ad-hoc time-series analytics...albeit, a custom layer that we wrote (not RecordLayer).

When RecordLayer launched, I tested it out by building a catalog system that we could evolve and add new services with a single repository of protobuf schemas.

can you do a concise +/- on FDB? I’ve always thought it was a fantastic architecture but never tried it. tia

Thanks. What are the typical use cases for FDB? What can it do that, say, Cassandra can't?

Curious, when you started on the your project, how did you discover and decide on using FoundationDB?

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