[monstrado]

I leveraged FoundationDB and RecordLayer to build a transactional catalog system for all our data services at a previous company, and it was honestly just an amazing piece of software. Adding gRPC into the mix for the serving layer felt so natural since schemas / records are defined using Protobuf with RecordLayer.

The only real downside is that the onramp for running FoundationDB at scale is quite a bit higher than a traditional distributed database.

[sidcool]

Sounds cool. Any write up on this? How did you approach the design? What was the motivation to use foundation db? How much did you/your team needed to learn while doing it?

[monstrado]

No write up, but the main reason was reusing the existing database we were comfortable deploying at the time. We were already using FDB for an online aggregation / mutation store for ad-hoc time-series analytics...albeit, a custom layer that we wrote (not RecordLayer).

When RecordLayer launched, I tested it out by building a catalog system that we could evolve and add new services with a single repository of protobuf schemas.

[sidcool]

Thanks. What are the typical use cases for FDB? What can it do that, say, Cassandra can't?

[extractionmech]

can you do a concise +/- on FDB? I’ve always thought it was a fantastic architecture but never tried it. tia

[rahul342]

Curious, when you started on the your project, how did you discover and decide on using FoundationDB?