skytable VS dragonfly

Hey HN!

I've been working on Skytable since 2020 and after several iterations from a simple K/V store, we've walked the path to this release. The goal of Skytable is to deliver a solid foundation for building data intensive applications.

Skytable's primary goal is performance and scale. Even with a query language it can outperform K/V stores which use simple commands (benchmarks will be shared in another post).

Several implementations in Skytable (especially around query evaluation and execution) are fundamentally different from SQL and even NoSQL counterparts and there are some entirely new concepts which might make it a little hard to grasp.

BlueQL is a very important part of Skytable and it employs some interesting concepts to try and reduce the surface for injection attacks and tries to be a modern and secure alternative to SQL.

- Source code: https://github.com/skytable/skytable

For those who were looking for the source code, here's the link: https://github.com/skytable/skytable

Link to source code: https://github.com/skytable/skytable

Here are some quick links: - Source code: https://github.com/skytable/skytable - Rust driver: https://github.com/skytable/client-rust

I think this is relevant... These are 3 OSS databases that can be an alternative to Redis:

- KeyDB: https://github.com/snapchat/keydb

- Dragonfly: https://github.com/dragonflydb/dragonfly

- Skytable: https://github.com/skytable/skytable

I have used keyDB before. The raft consensus makes building an HA Redis easy.

:) in fact, I copied the definition from the project page and Skytable is not finished project yet. You can see here, the real time features in the road map. https://github.com/skytable/skytable/issues/203

https://github.com/dragonflydb/dragonfly is another option. Not a fork but API-compatible reimplementation.

Our journey will involve leveraging the capabilities of Dragonfly, a highly efficient drop-in replacement for Redis, known for its ultra-high throughput and multi-threaded share-nothing architecture. Specifically, we'll be utilizing two of Dragonfly's data types: Sorted-Set and Hash. These data structures are perfect for handling real-time data and ranking systems, making them ideal for our leaderboards.

2023 has been a year with remarkable advancements in AI capabilities, and at Dragonfly, we are thrilled to power new use cases with our latest release: Dragonfly Search. This new feature set, debuting in Dragonfly v1.13, is a subset of RediSearch-compatible commands implemented natively in Dragonfly, allowing for both vector search and faceted search use cases in the highly scalable and performant Dragonfly in-memory data store.

If you have not heard about Dragonfly - please check it out. It uses - what I hope - novel and interesting ideas backed up by the research from recent years [1] and [2]. It's meant to fix many problems that exist with Redis today. I have been working on Dragonfly for the last 7 months and it has been one of the more interesting and challenging projects I've ever done!

I recently ran across the the license for Dragonfly [1] which has some restrictions (rights reserved), but 5 years after the license date the license switches to Apache 2.0. Basically a timed-limited rights reservation. I don't hate it. I might even contribute to such a project for free.

I would consider something like this: When I release code, it's rights reserved for 5 years, then open-source (and this baked into an irrevocable license). Anyone may use the software for non-commercial purposes. Anyone may contribute, those who contribute will be granted permission for commercial use if I deem their contributions significant enough. Anyone may distribute the software under these terms.

If such a model became popular, I have a hard time imagining it could make things any worse. It might even accelerate open-source development. You might say, "but it's not open-source", fair enough, but we can view it as open-source contribution with a delay. For example, if this model became wildely popular this year, and we saw great progress with this model, then come 2028 we would be flooded with new open-source software and ultimately might be better off than it would have been without this model.

(And this whole thing makes me rethink copyright and patents and how much they really contribute to society. Perhaps they should be shortened?)

[1]: https://github.com/dragonflydb/dragonfly/blob/main/LICENSE.m...

Maybe check out https://www.dragonflydb.io/ It claims to have a full redis implementation.