[dobe]

hi, this is bernd from crate ... first - we are overwhelmed here at crate that we are mentioned at hacker news! by reading through the comments on this page, i thought it would make sense to give you some background, which should at least partly answer some questions mentioned here.

- we come from the service business and discovered that nearly every database design for applications which needed to scale somewhere reached a point where data needed to be de-normalized because joins where simply too expensive in terms of cost and latency when data does not fit on a single affordable machine. therefore we do not have join support yet. however we already planned to allow joins in the future which still makes sense for smaller datasets of course, but it is currently not a top priority, since many join use-cases could also be implemented by using nested objects which we support.

- we have chosen SQL as a query language, since this allows us to re-use existing ORMs and tools. but most of all SQL is still a great language to define queries, so we thought "why re-invent the wheel and crate yet another query syntax"

- regarding sharding: we use a hash/modulo based sharding mechanisms - actually the same as elasticsearch, since we use elasticsearch under the hood for cluster state, sharding and replication. we also added partitioned table support in our current development branch.

there are still a lot of features on our roadmap; and apparently also a lot of things we need to document and explain in our documentation. so if you are interested in our progress you might keep an eye on our github project page https://github.com/crate/crate

thx, bernd