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websiteapi

All of these apply to FoundationDB as well.

- Slow code writing.

- DST

- No dependencies

- Distributed by default in prod

- Clock fault tolerance with optimistic locking

- Jepsen claimed that FDB has more rigorous testing than they could do.

- New programming language, Flow, for testing.

You probably could solve the same problems with FDB, but TigerBeetle I imagine is more optimized for its use case (I would hope...).

AFAIK - the only reason FDB isn't massively popular is because no one has bothered to write good layers on top. I do know of a few folks writing a SQS, DynamoDB and SQLite layers.

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> the only reason FDB isn't massively popular

The only reason is Apple. They liked the product that was released in 2013 so much they bought the whole company, and all other FoundationDB users were abandoned and were forced to drop it.

Who would trust a database that can be yanked out of you at any moment? Though a lot of products have license terms like this only a handful were ever discontinued so abruptly. It's under Apache license now but the trust is not coming back.

Well, all users except Snowflake.

And a more serious comment, to separate it from the silly one below:

Interesting that they didn't release it with an SQL client, is there no way to make it compatible? Even with extensions to SQL, I imagine it would be great for a lot of use cases.

Edit: ah, it's more of a key-value store.

I am currently working on a post about DST with their team too haha!

> AFAIK - the only reason FDB isn't massively popular is because no one has bothered to write good layers on top. I do know of a few folks writing a SQS, DynamoDB and SQLite layers.

I started writing this comment:

> It seems interesting, but considering what it's for, why aren't the hyperscalers using it?

And while writing it I started searching for FoundationDB and found this:

> https://github.com/<<apple>>/foundationdb

Ah, all right :-p

I thought they got bought by Apple and what happened to it after?

Apple bought them, took it down from the web, then quietly open-sourced it a few years later. They tried to make it popular, ran a conference for it, but the adoption was too minor for Apple to care afterwards.

It's still maintained by a sizable team at Apple, GH stats show that the activity is much lower now than it was 3 years ago, but there're about 10 people that contribute on a steady regular basis, which is honestly better than 99% of open source projects out there.

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