FoundationDB Papers Accepted to SIGMOD'21

Published March 26, 2021

We are pleased to announce that FoundationDB: A Distributed, Unbundled, Transactional Key Value Store and QuiCK: A Queuing System in CloudKit have been accepted to SIGMOD'21 Industry track.

FoundationDB is an open source transactional key value store created more than ten years ago. It is one of the first systems to combine the flexibility and scalability of NoSQL architectures with the power of ACID transactions (a.k.a. NewSQL). FoundationDB adopts an unbundled architecture that decouples an in-memory transaction management system, a distributed storage system, and a built-in distributed configuration system. Each sub-system can be independently provisioned and configured to achieve the desired scalability, high-availability and fault tolerance properties. FoundationDB uniquely integrates a deterministic simulation framework, used to test every new feature of the system under a myriad of possible faults. This rigorous testing makes FoundationDB extremely stable and allows developers to introduce and release new features in a rapid cadence. FoundationDB offers a minimal and carefully chosen feature set, which has enabled a range of disparate systems (from semi-relational databases, document and object stores, to graph databases and more) to be built as layers on top. FoundationDB is the underpinning of cloud infrastructure at Apple, Snowflake and other companies, due to its consistency, robustness and availability for storing user data, system metadata and configuration, and other critical information.

The annual ACM SIGMOD/PODS conference is a leading international forum for database researchers, practitioners, developers, and users to explore cutting-edge ideas and results, and to exchange techniques, tools, and experiences. SIGMOD'21 will be in an online format this year, so all may easily attend.

Other publications serve as reference for how to leverage FoundationDB as a solution to large-scale data infrastructure problems: FoundationDB Record Layer: A Multi-Tenant Structured Datastore (SIGMOD ’19) presents a record-oriented data model and query language on top of FoundationDB. CloudKit: Structured Storage for Mobile Applications (VLDB ’18) is a service used at scale, world wide, that uses FoundationDB and the Record Layer; the Record Layer paper describes some of the advantages CloudKit reaps from using FoundationDB. Finally, QuiCK: A Queuing System in CloudKit (SIGMOD ’21) is a queuing system for deferred tasks in CloudKit that leverages many of the features provided by FoundationDB. Further details on the design, implementation, and production usage of FoundationDB can be found in the recorded talks from the FoundationDB Summit 2018 and FoundationDB Summit 2019.

For any questions about the paper, the FoundationDB developers can be best reached on the FoundationDB forums. And to everyone that has contributed to FoundationDB over the years: thank you!