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by p-e-w 1150 days ago
> There is zero reason for a language runtime to be opinionated about the database.

The API is extremely simple. It's little more than a hash map. That's hardly opinionated.

> All the good programming advice will tell you such a coupling is a bad idea.

That advice is outdated. Virtually any modern application will want a database, and this API can serve as a foundation for it – a foundation that conveniently already has many of the features (esp. global replication and consistency) that you will want and that are incredibly difficult to get right if you build them yourself. Think of this as the application's "file system". PaaS today usually doesn't provide direct disk access, so this is the low-level abstraction for persistent storage that is available. An abstraction that, in many cases, will in fact be all your application ever needs.
2 comments
jabradoodle 1150 days ago
I'm not familiar with the offering but find your comment confusing. It seems to suggest there isn't lock in because it's just a hashmap, but also that it is globally replicated and consistent.
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iudqnolq 1150 days ago
If you don't deploy to deno cloud it's just SQLite and not distributed.

If you do deploy to deno cloud it's trivial to migrate because there are many competing offerings of kv stores.

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jabradoodle 1150 days ago
If no claim of compatibility with other backends is provided I would be skeptical that it will be trivial by necessity.

I'm not that familiar with either technology, but as an example, deno kv claims strong consistency as the default; while dynamodb requires you to explicitly ask for strong consistency in queries and does not support strongly consistent reads on secondary indexes.

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KyleJune 1150 days ago
When not in deploy, you'd be stuck with a non distributed SQLite database for each instance your application is hosted on. There currently isn't a way to swap the backend for the deno kv API, so you would still need to update your code to use the new kv store that would have a different API. If you use redis instead, you'd be able to easily be able to switch providers by changing configuration options instead of having to update your code wherever it is used.
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nateb2022 1150 days ago
> The API is extremely simple. It's little more than a hash map. That's hardly opinionated.

In that case, why does Deno have to provide this? Can't users simply create their own hashmap?

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