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Correct me if I'm wrong, but what happened to FoundationDB smells like an acqui-hire par excellence. This article provides an interesting alternative to the "Apple bought this space age technology to keep it to themselves" narrative.

Seems like the guy knows what he's talking about as well, b/c surprise, he's working on a DB.

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There's a third option: Apple had a need for a massive, distributed K/V store, and at their scale, it's cheaper to buy a company than a license.

http://cassandra.apache.org/

I'm not sure why Apple would prefer FoundationDB to Cassandra for this usecase.

Perhaps because FoundationDB is ACID compliant?

Quorum Writes, Quorum Reads is as ACID compliant as FoundationDB iirc.

The only thing I can think of is Apple has an internal team that is building a Cassandra replacement and they need more qualified engineers with experience.

Not even close. FDB did arbitrary multi-key transactions. Cassandra can only do Compare-And-Set on single keys IIRC.

So there is a point here. Apple is trying to compete with Google. Google has some amazing distributed systems, including Spanner, F1, MillWheel, etc... Apple has Cassandra and other OSS/COTS software. Not to ding Cassandra, but this is a problem for Apple. We've seen repeatedly that at huge scale, it often makes sense to own (or control) the software. See Facebook and LinkedIn as well.

Now I don't think FDB (the product) is the answer, at least not in the short term. There are more problems scaling it to Apple's use case than there are working around Cassandra's lack of ACID.

So I'm convinced the value of FDB is the experience in the engineers' brains. Apple need brains to run Cassandra, but also to figure out if Cassandra is the right long term path. Build, buy, adapt? It takes veterans to make the right call.

Apple runs Cassandra at scale today. It underpins most of iTunes Match and last time I checked all your iCloud data was sharded and stored in Cassandra. They run one of the latest clusters in the world (at least the last time I spoke with Datastax). Cassandra is a pretty easy database to run and scale and Datastax is just down the road from them to help.

My guess is that FoundationDB is replacing their Teradata installation. Better to buy the company and invest heavily in it then let it not met it's full potential as a small startup.

Why do people think ACID is some panacea for every database problem ? It doesn't save you from data loss. It doesn't help you scale. It doesn't make it easier to manage. It doesn't actually help with 99% of the problems you typically experience with a database.

A more measured, intelligent consideration of pros/cons is needed.

>> A more measured, intelligent consideration of pros/cons is needed.

Every April 1st :)

According to the Cassandra home page: "One of the largest production deployments is Apple's, with over 75,000 nodes storing over 10 PB of data."

Apple is a heavy user of Teradata which according to this article they were the quickest to reach a petabyte. It is now 2 years later and they could be in the tens of petabytes given the success of iPhone 6 and integration with Beats.

https://gigaom.com/2013/03/27/why-apple-ebay-and-walmart-hav...

Teradata is VERY expensive and my guess is reaching also scalability limits.

FoundationDB solves completely different problems than Teradata. FDB isn't an analytical store.

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