🚀 Just launched a new scalable cloud graph database! Any feedback/users/testers appreciated!

Thank you very much for the kind words @thmsobrmlr! I have created all the illustrations on the website using Photoshop.

Hey @thmsobrmlr thanks for your comment! Yeah it's currently in public beta. So we've been running SurrealDB (the pre-beta Golang version) in production since 2019. We learnt a lot from building a database in Golang, and so the Rust version has many more improvements (memory improvements, memory safety, performance improvements, query language improvements, data serialisation improvements, and so many more things...).

Some of the SaaS platforms that we are running on SurrealDB can be seen here: https://github.com/surrealdb/showcase . There are definitely performance improvements we want to make SurrealDB, and we'll be making these as soon as possible, before our 1.0 launch (https://surrealdb.com/roadmap). We will also be launching some demo/example apps which will help with getting started on SurrealDB.

We'd love for you to try SurrealDB out on a weekend project! If you have any questions then you can reach us on Github / Discord (https://surrealdb.com/community)!

The website/branding/design/illustration wizardry is all @jscmh so I'll let him answer that 😀!

Thanks @makeshiftIndie! Would be great to see how SurrealDB could be used in a full ETL project. As @jscmh said - feel free to ask any questions, or if you have any suggestions we'd love to hear them!

Thank you very much @makeshiftIndie! 😊 Jump on our Discord (https://surrealdb.com/discord) so we can answer any questions you might have.

Thank you vey much @MrJustinF! Submitted to BetaList!

Thanks @erengunduz!

Thank you very much @erengunduz! 😊

Thank you very much indeed @mr_olafsson!

Thanks for your kind words @mr_olafsson! We'll be keeping our Indie Hackers profile up-to-date, but you can also follow the community in other ways if you want (https://surrealdb.com/community)!

Thank you very much @JosieJoe!

Thanks @JosieJoe!

Thanks @leesus! As @jscmh said we're looking to get some example apps as soon as possible! We'll let you know when we've got something ready!

Hi @leesus , thanks for your comment! We know we are lacking in this area at the moment, and are looking to add some example / demo applications soon (React and Ember.js to begin with). We also plan to release a few videos to show just how quick and easy it can be to build on top of SurrealDB.

@fabcgn, thank you so much!

Thank you very much @fabcgn! Glad you like it!

Cheers @graemefunke! Thanks so much!

Thank you very much @graemefunke!

@jwalker thanks so much! When you're ready, you can join our Discord (https://surrealdb.com/discord) for questions, help, and for any ideas you might have!

Thank you very much indeed @jwalker!

Thank you very much for the kudos @gauravnlotekar 👍

Hi @gauravnlotekar! Thanks for your comment! There are definitely loads of databases out there and we love so many things about pretty much all of them! There wasn't one we were truly happy with though!

I think the main thing that was super important to us was the ability to build our frontend applications super easily and quickly. We used to build our applications on top of PostgreSQL + OrientDB + InfluxDB + DynamoDB (and we also have had MongoDB / RethinkDB / Couchbase in our stacks too), but we were always building complicated APIs in front of these databases in order to get the functionality that we wanted in our apps. SurrealDB enables us to cut out all of this development and infrastructure management, so that we could focus on the features in the app and not the infrastructure. it also means we are able to build better apps, and build them quicker.

We also didn't want to rely on an API in the cloud, or a data-layer (not quite a database but something that enabled storing and querying data aka Firebase). We wanted a full-blown database so we could query our data in many different flexible ways (computed views for analytics dashboards, graph connections for relationship analysis, nested fields for complex document data) - directly from the client.

In addition there were so many nice features from different separate databases that we wanted in one platform. Computed analytics views in CouchDB and Couchbase, nested fields and documents in MongoDB, remote http requests in RethinkDB, sql graph querying in OrientDB, permissions and security in Firebase, distributed in CockroachDB, schemafull in relational databases, a full-on type system in relational databases, graph relations in Neo4j, and so on... With all of these features, one can build some pretty powerful frontend apps!

What we've seen so far is that the developers who are getting started on SurrealDB are all using it in different ways - which is great - so it's going to be interesting working out what people love about it most!

We're definitely going to be releasing tutorials and blogs on the internal workings of the DB, and we have some blog posts planned for a closer look at the Rust ❤️ code, and some of the libraries that we have used.

It would be absolutely brilliant for any contributions with regards to tutorials or blogs! That would be amazing! Out of interest, what languages/frameworks/infrastructure/tools is your expertise in?

Hi @productpirate, thanks for your comment! As this is our initial beta release at the moment, there are a number of code performance improvements that we will be getting to as soon as possible. As soon as those improvements are done, we will get on to some proper benchmarking of massive datasets, and will get these on to the website!

In terms of scalability of requests, it is possible to horizontally scale SurrealDB so that more, and more data compute nodes are able to handle more data. Database transactions are concurrent and will only conflict if data to the same record is made at the same time. In this respect it is able to scale to really large data sets.

We are also working on a new key-value store implementation for single-node use-case. We've chosen not to go with RocksDB/LevelDB or other libraries, and are building our own key-value store (which will be open source). The technical design of this kv store will be really performant, and it will will operate in a hybrid of memory and on-disk (all datastore keys will be in memory). I actually wrote a thesis / white paper on this (https://surrealdb.com/static/whitepaper.pdf).

We've got some exciting things to come in the pipeline!

Hi @Tzahi, we were actually big users of OrientDB way back in 2014-2015, and it was one of the reasons we decided to create SurrealDB. We took a lot of inspiration from OrientDB (you'll notice the similarities, and differences, with the SQL syntax and RIDs). We've also taken inspiration (albeit somewhat different) from CouchDB, MongoDB, InfluxDB, RethinkDB, Firebase, CockroachDB... (we love databases)!

There are a number of differences between SurrealDB and OrientDB:

1. Main difference is that you can connect directly to SurrealDB from a client device (SurrealDB has permissions, and authentication built right into it so you can securely run queries directly from Chrome/Safari or an Electron app). This is similar to Firebase.

2. Differences in the query language. We have implemented record ids differently, so that they can be used easily directly from clients, and play nicely with URLs. There are also differences with the query language (we've spent a lot of time trying to make the SurrealQL query language as nice to use as possible). We have in-built JavaScript functions, computed variables (which only compute when data is selected), decimal numbers (so you can easily perform mathematical calculations right in the browser without experiencing 64 point floating number rounding issues), geospatial/geojson types, complex expressions....

SELECT ->knows->(? AS f1)->knows->(? AS f2)->(knows, likes AS e3 WHERE influencer = true)->(? AS f3) FROM person:tobie;

3. There is a difference in how the distributed mode works in SurrealDB. SurrealDB is built on top of ACID key-value stores.

4. We are close to releasing our WebAssembly release, which will enable SurrealDB to run in the browser, using IndexedDB as a persistent backing store. Eventually, this in-browser version will sync to the cloud allowing for offline and online data syncing for applications.

If you haven't already seen it, our features page (https://surrealdb.com/features) is a great place to see an overview of a lot of the functionality.

Hope that answered your question. Feel free to ask anything else!

Hey @ivanderbu2. We'll be launching our fully managed, cloud-hosted platform later this year - which will be comparable to the Aura hosted cloud version. In the meantime you can download and run SurrealDB locally, or in your own cloud. - we'll have some documentation for deploying SurrealDB in the production soon.

We've spent a lot of time trying to make SurrealQL simple and beautiful to use. You can do some really clever stuff with the language, and extend it with JavaScript if you want to go even further!

I think a big difference between SurrealDB and Neo4j is the table concept with the graph edges between. It makes it very simple to model your data (thinking in terms of tables and types), but with the addition of simple record links, and full graph edges.

We have a very big vision for SurrealDB, and have a lot of stuff planned for the future. Being able to support enterprise clients is obviously of big importance to us, and especially as we grow, that's going to be a key focus for us. We aren't going anywhere! In addition SurrealDB is effectively open source. There are no limits to using the database in an enterprise setting either in single-mode or distributed mode. The license allows everything except for setting up a paid cloud-hosted platform. So from an enterprise use-case point-of-view, it is effectively open source, and has no limits.

Can I clarify what you mean by certifications? Certifications for developers, or the platform type (ISO 27001, SOC 2, HIPAA)?

Thanks @pdyc! Granularity of permissions is on TABLEs and FIELDs.

DEFINE TABLE person SCHEMAFULL PERMISSIONS FOR select WHERE $auth.admin = true OR author = $auth.id;
and
DEFINE FIELD metadata.hidden ON person TYPE object PERMISSIONS WHERE $auth.admin = true;

Hi @Ghidra, that's a really good point / question. So obviously it's early days (this is only our initial 1.0 beta release), while MySQL was released in 1995, PostgreSQL in 1996, MongoDB in 2009, and so on, as you know! However we have been building SurrealDB over the last 7 years, and have been using it in production (at scale) in a number of SaaS and ecommerce platforms for the last 4 years, while we continued to build it out and develop the features we needed. We both have vast experience building distributed and highly-available software platforms, with a large variety of backends / setups / databases / technologies - and that was the very reason why we decided to build SurrealDB - so that we could simplify that very process.

We know there are performance improvements needed in certain parts of the database code (especially with zero-copy datastore key serialization, and also with certain reference sharing within the code), but we have these changes planned!

In addition, I've completed a MSc in Computer Science / Software Engineering from University of Oxford where I focused on distributed systems and databases. My distinction thesis (https://surrealdb.com/static/whitepaper.pdf) focused on a very core part of the underlying technology (key-value stores) for use in distributed databases.

Finally, we initially built our database (for ourselves) in Golang, however after extensive experience pushing the language to its limits, and overcoming some of the difficulties with the language, when open sourcing it we decided to re-build it in Rust. This obviously has a number of benefits including memory safety, performance, and a number of improvements to the SQL query parser and serialisation technology, which translate to a much more stable product!

@koakh thanks for your awesome comment 😀! Great to have you on-board the SurrealDB journey!

Thank you very much for the kind words @koakh! Your English is great! @tobiemh and I have many exciting features coming to SurrealDB. Thank you very much for all your feedback and contribution so far!

Hi @ShaneBellone - thanks for your comment! In addition to the query language being very different, it also has permissions and realtime functionality built right into every table/field, along with authentication, so you can connect to it and query directly from a browser, client library, or end user device.

Furthermore, you don't have to choose upfront how you store your data (i.e you don't have to choose between tables, documents, links, or graph, and you don't have to choose a specific API - but can use them all at the same time), opening up some interesting possibilities when it comes to modelling and analysing your data.

In addition to the distributed cloud version, we plan to release an embedded version soon too, which will enable embedding SurrealDB in the browser (in WASM), in Python, Node.js, and C to begin with!