Comment by Dave_Rosenthal | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Dave_Rosenthal | Hacker News Reader

As a FoundationDB partisan, it's been great to see more and more people starting to build stuff with it. Someone recently told me that they think of FDB as "assembly language for databases". I liked that. I think it faithfully captures both the good and bad parts of FoundationDB:

1) You are starting with a blank canvas

2) You will be dealing with low-level primitives

3) You have complete freedom in what you build

4) It's fast if you use it right

For each one of these items you could look at it and say "that's awesome" or "yikes." You know which group you are in!

I hope more people in the 'awesome' group realize that using FoundationDB can transform the development of a new distributed data store from a multi-year project into a few weeks of hacking. This is because FoundationDB solves the scalability, fault tolerance, and ACID parts for free--the least creative and most time-consuming aspects.

Do you feel like the tutorials on https://apple.github.io/foundationdb/tutorials.html#fundamen... are a good way for someone to get an impression of what the experience of working with FoundationDB feels like in practice? Are there any go-to walkthroughs that you'd recommend?

That class scheduling one is a good place to grok the basics. Just extending the kind of approach introduced there will get you decently far.

The best resource after the tutorials is: https://github.com/FoundationDB/awesome-foundationdb

Unfortunately, I think a lot of the advanced 'tricks of the trade' (alternatives to use cases for long-running transactions, when exactly to dispatch to a cloud object store, how to migrate whatever schemas you end up creating, etc.) that all the big serious users of FDB are doing are not as well covered.

I for one would be an avid audience if you ever wanted to blog about any of that!

Yes I’m sad that still nobody did a rock solid implementation of the Postgres API… I will use it all the time if someone did. I would have the best of both worlds.

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