[ako]

Seems like a lot of what fauna does by storing documents isn’t really new, oracle, Postgres and others have provided this for a long time. I was really surprised by the performance of json queries [1], opens the doors to using Postgres as a client api cache, storing the payload in a table, and doing deserialization using (materialized) views.

Difference seems to be the approach to minimize number of calls from your application, get all require session data in one call, similar to what graphql is doing for api calls. They’re also using http as the protocol for database connectivity.

[1]: https://ako.github.io/blog/2023/08/25/json-transformations.h...

[default-kramer]

Using FQL instead of SQL seems to be a pretty big difference too.

[ako]

Postgres has procedural languages and enables you to return complex json structures combined of relational data and json documents both with its procedural languages and regular sql. Sure, the syntax is different, but not sure if the difference makes a big impact.

[robertlagrant]

Yes - the difference you mention seems to be the main difference.

[ttfkam]

CTEs and query pipelining are not sufficient?