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Comment by jwr | Hacker News Reader

Healthy reminder that a pretty website and warm fuzzies all over do not make a distributed database actually work.

I witnessed RethinkDB losing to MongoDB in spite of being significantly better. I am now worried that FoundationDB isn't gaining popularity, even though it is arguably the best and most well-tested distributed database out there, with strict serializability (!) guarantees. But it doesn't have a shiny website and doesn't cause warm fuzzies, quite the opposite, it looks complex and intimidating. So it isn't popular.

This is worrying, but perhaps neither new nor surprising: we have a history of picking inferior solutions because the good ones looked too complex or intimidating (betamax vs VHS in video formats, ATM vs Ethernet in WANs).

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I had understood FoundationDB to be more akin to a storage engine (e.g. a sub-component of a DBMS) than a full-on DBMS. Was I misunderstanding? If so I bet a lot of people have this understanding, going back to your point on the web site/general sentiment in the zeitgeist not necessarily reflecting what they are.

Can you share any more detail? Are you saying there are companies that build software on top of FoundationDB as their primary data store? or are those companies building software around FoundationDB that in turn presents as more of a data store in the traditional sense?

Snowflake uses foundationdb as their metadata store to find files in S3, though I believe the actual queries are run on separate nodes.

https://www.snowflake.com/blog/how-foundationdb-powers-snowf...

But yeah you're right for the most part. Turns out pretty much any database can be written in terms of transactions of KV pairs, which is what foundationdb gives you, so it means you can write your database query layer as a stateless, scalable service.

There have been attempts to write a SQL RDMS layer for it but it isn't maintained.

It's more of a database-building toolkit than a storage engine. What you get is a distributed KV store with a strict serializable consistency model (see https://jepsen.io/consistency) and very interesting versionstamp functionality.

What you do not get is a "query language" or indexing.

Yes, there are companies that use FoundationDB as their primary data store. It makes a lot of sense to integrate it directly with the application rather than go through additional layers and a "query language". I am working on adapting my app to use it, and so far very happy with the results.

Thanks for the helpful clarification and very interesting

I think for foundationdb to gain traction, someone needs to build a frontend for it with more advanced query capabilities than KV.

and a pattern that deals with larger transactions and keys. it just is a requirement. People run into this late, and it kind of screws them up.

also, a lot more operational tooling would be nice.

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