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Comment by anon291 | Hacker News Reader

This seems to be a key value store built atop object storage. Which is to say, it seems completely redundant. Not sure if there's some feature I'm missing, but all of the six features mentioned on the front page are things you'd have if you used the key value store directly (actually, you get more because then you get multiple writers).

I was excited at first and thought this was SQL atop S3 et al. I've jerryrigged a solution to this using SQLite with a customized VFS backend, and would suggest that as an alternative to this particular project. You get the benefit of ACID transactions across multiple tables and a distributed backend.

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People want object storage as the backend because in practice it means that you can decouple compute and storage entirely, it has no requirement to provision space up front, and robust object storage systems with (de facto) standardized APIs like S3's are widely available for all kinds of deployments and from many providers, in many forms. In other words: it works with what people already have and want.

Essentially every standalone or embedded key-value storage solution treats the KV store and its operation like a database, from what I can tell -- which is sensible because that's what they are! But people use object stores exactly because they don't operate like traditional databases.

Now there are problems with object stores (they are very coarse grained and have high per-object overhead, necessitating some design that can reconcile the round hole and the square peg) -- but this is just the reality of what people are working with. If there is some other key-value store server/implementation you know of, one that performs and offers APIs like an actual database (e.g. multi writer, range scans, atomic writes) but with unlimited storage, no provisioning, and it's got over 10+ different widespread implementations across every major compute and cloud provider -- I'm interested in what that project is.

This is a low-level embedded db that would be used by sql databases/query engines/streaming engines/etc rather than something that's likely to make sense for you to use as an application developer. It sits in a similar space to RocksDB and LevelDB.

You generally can't use object storage directly for this stuff; if you have a high volume of writes, it's incredibly slow (and expensive) to write them individually to s3. Similarly, on the read side you want to be able to cache data on local disk & memory to reduce query latency and cost.

Using an s3 object per key would be too expensive for many use cases.

The website is a bit fancy but the readme seems to pretty straightforwardly explain why you might want this. It seems to me like a nice little (13k loc) project that doesn't fit my needs but might come in handy for someone else?

> I was excited at first and thought this was SQL atop S3 et al.

You can check out Neon.tech who makes an OS Postgres-on-s3 and DuckDB who makes an embedded DB with transaction support that can operate over S3

If you want SQLite backed by S3, maybe something like SQLite in :memory: mode with Litestream would work?

Edit: actually not sure if you can use :memory: mode since Litestream uses the WAL (IIRC), so maybe a ramfs instead

There are many solutions. The particular example I was using SQLite via webassembly and then resorting to HTTP's fetch api for a read-only solution.

In my experience, SQLite on S3 is ridiculously slow. The round trip for writes is horrendous, so you end up doing batch saves, but you need a WAL, which has the same problem as the main DB file.

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