by gempir on 1/17/24, 3:05 PM with 190 comments
by tombert on 1/17/24, 3:50 PM
Fundamentally they do the same thing, and are sort of just optimizations for particular problem-sets. A database is great for data that has proper indexes, a file system is great for much more arbitrary data [1].
If you’re a clever enough engineer, you can define a file system in terms of a database, as evidenced by iCloud. Personally, I have used this knowledge to use Cassandra to store blobs of video for HLS streams. This buys me a lot of Cassandra’s distributed niceties, at the cost of having to sort of reinvent some file system stuff.
[1] I realize that this is very simplified; I am just speaking extremely high level.
by sporkland on 1/17/24, 7:48 PM
"FoundationDB: A Distributed Key-Value Store" [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36572658]
"FoundationDB Record Layer" [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18906341]
"Apple Acquires FoundationDB [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9259986]
"How FoundationDB works and why it works" [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37552085]
by monstrado on 1/17/24, 4:38 PM
The only real downside is that the onramp for running FoundationDB at scale is quite a bit higher than a traditional distributed database.
by thund on 1/18/24, 3:59 AM
Now Apple is asking all file sync products like Dropbox to do the same, see Fileprovider API, breaking those as well. Really annoying
by BugsJustFindMe on 1/17/24, 4:18 PM
by chazeon on 1/17/24, 9:18 PM
by redbell on 1/17/24, 9:20 PM
In the HN guidelines, you read: "Otherwise, please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize."
I hope this will be taken into consideration.
by alberth on 1/17/24, 5:46 PM
Given that FoundationDB is built on top of SQLite, I wonder if that team is eyeing the HCTree engine for it.
It's still in experimental mode but provides literally 10x improvement on read/writes to SQLite.
Given Apple size & scale of iCloud, that seems like a massive win for them if that engine for SQLite can mature to production stability.
https://sqlite.org/hctree/doc/hctree/doc/hctree/threadtest.w...
by citizenpaul on 1/17/24, 7:58 PM
Someone feel free to correct my memory if needed, I was not the primary person for this system or anything so I could be totally wrong.
by clintonb on 1/17/24, 3:48 PM
by jelder on 1/17/24, 8:48 PM
Quite different from a SaaS-first approach where it actually makes sense to do "customer id column"-based multi-tenancy and one-migration-at-a-time schema changes that I think most of us at less-than-Apple scales are familiar with.
by zaking17 on 1/17/24, 4:34 PM
by oblib on 1/17/24, 5:11 PM
by yosito on 1/17/24, 10:15 PM
by ultra-jeremyx on 1/17/24, 5:59 PM
by kjkjadksj on 1/17/24, 8:09 PM
by colesantiago on 1/17/24, 3:51 PM
by Y-bar on 1/17/24, 3:51 PM
Phone says this since many years and iOS updates back: 10365 photos synced, Mac says: 10251 photos synced.
by throwitaway222 on 1/17/24, 5:29 PM
2010 - We need 2 databases
2015 - We need 500 databases
2020 - We need billions of databases
2025 - Prediction: We need 1 database.