TechCrunch reported yesterday that Apple has acquired FoundationDB. And while I didn’t see any mention if this news on the FoundationDB website, they do have an announcement saying: “We have made the decision to evolve our company mission and, as of today, we will no longer offer downloads.”
This is an unfortunate development – I have been watching FoundationDB technology for years and was always impressed in terms of its performance and features. I was particularly impressed by their demo at last year’s Percona Live MySQL and Expo. Using their Intel NUC-based Cluster, I remember Ori Herrnstadt showing me how FoundationDB handles single-node failure as well as recovery from complete power-down – very quickly and seamlessly. We have borrowed a lot of ideas from this setup for our Percona XtraDB Cluster Demos.
I think it was a great design to build a distributed, shared-nothing transaction aware key value store, and then have an SQL Layer built on top of it. I did not have a chance to test it hands-on, though. Such a test would have revealed the capabilities of the SQL optimizer – the biggest challenge for distributed relational database systems.
My hope was to see, over time, this technology becoming available as open source (fully or partially), which would have dramatically increased adoption by the masses. It will be interesting to see Apple’s long-terms plans for this technology.
In any case it looks like FoundationDB software is off limits. If you are an existing FoundationDB customer looking for alternatives, we here at Percona would be happy to help evaluate options and develop a migration strategy if necessary.
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