FoundationDB Summit 2019

FoundationDB tackles some wickedly hard problems in distributed systems and offers developers a reliable toolkit for building modern data services. The resulting layered approach to database development is an attractive architecture for “new construction”, but how well does it work in a renovation?

The Apache CouchDB project is adopting FoundationDB as its core persistence layer. CouchDB is a JSON document store that implements many standard DB features (primary keys, indexes, materialized views) as well as some more exotic ones, including active/active replication across any user-defined set of databases. We’ll discuss CouchDB’s rationale for adopting FoundationDB and report our progress on this journey. We’ll provide comparisons to extant layers like RecordLayer and DocumentLayer, and share some of our experiences running an open source database project over the past decade.