Leverage Multiple Database Models in One Platform with SurrealDB ft. Tobie Morgan Hitchcock
Dec 5, 2024
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Tobie Morgan Hitchcock, co-founder and CEO of SurrealDB, dives into the world of modern database solutions. He discusses the innovative multi-model approach of SurrealDB, which combines relational, graph, and document models into one platform, simplifying data management. Tobie highlights the fascinating 'time travel' feature for retrieving historical data and shares insights on the challenges of building a new database from scratch. He emphasizes the enthusiastic response from developers and the need for education around these new tools.
SurrealDB simplifies database management by integrating multiple data models into a single platform, enhancing developer efficiency and streamlining queries.
The innovative time travel feature allows users to access historical data easily, facilitating improved analysis and auditing without complex metadata management.
Deep dives
Rapid Adoption and Community Growth
SurrealDB has experienced a swift increase in popularity, marked by a significant rise in GitHub stars and a burgeoning Discord community. Developers recognize how SurrealDB effectively addresses their ongoing issues and enhances their daily work experiences within their organizations. The platform is being utilized by a variety of large organizations, particularly in retail, which manage massive deployments that involve millions of queries per hour and users. This demonstrates that SurrealDB is successfully solving complex problems that have hindered organizations for years.
Consolidating Database Models
SurrealDB was created to alleviate the difficulties encountered when multiple databases, such as relational, time series, graph, and document databases, are used together in applications. The architecture allows users to start with different data models and aggregate them easily without pre-defining a model upfront. With the ability to combine multiple models in single queries, developers can effectively execute queries that span various types of data storage and retrieval methods. This unified approach streamlines both application management and infrastructure complexity.
Separation of Storage and Computation
A key feature of SurrealDB is the separation of the storage layer from the computation layer, which optimizes performance when managing queries. By handling computations and queries independently from the storage, it allows flexibility in how data is organized and accessed without sacrificing efficiency. This architecture supports multiple models within a single framework, enabling seamless data management and improved query performance. The ability to query data across different models reduces the performance drop often seen when relying on multiple distinct database environments.
Innovative Time Travel Feature
SurrealDB offers a unique time travel capability that enables users to query the database as it existed at any specified point in time. This feature eliminates the need for complex metadata management and allows for seamless access to historical data. Users can easily run queries to understand relationships and data trends as they were in the past, enhancing data analysis and auditing capabilities. By storing every version of each key-value pair, SurrealDB facilitates in-depth examination of how data has evolved over time, presenting exciting possibilities for various applications.
In this episode of the Modern Web Podcast, recorded at All Things Open in Raleigh, NC, Rob Ocel talks with Tobie Morgan Hitchcock, co-founder and CEO of SurrealDB, about redefining databases. SurrealDB consolidates the complexity of using multiple database models—relational, graph, document, and more—into a single platform, enabling advanced queries and features like time travel. Toby shares insights on its innovative approach to separating storage and compute layers, the challenges of building from scratch, and the enthusiastic adoption by developers and enterprises.
Chapter
00:00 - Introduction and Setting the Stage
01:46 - Why Create Another Database?
04:31 - How SurrealDB Works
07:36 - The Developer Experience with SurrealDB
11:01 - Time Travel in Databases
16:21 - Challenges and Opportunities in Database Innovation
20:01 - Educating Developers on SurrealDB + Community and Adoption