Apple has made its FoundationDB core open source, and wants all future major development to be carried out openly. Apple acquired FoundationDB in 2015.

FoundationDB is very fast, supports ACID-compliant transactions even though it’s NoSQL, and scales well. It's a distributed database designed to run on clusters of commodity servers to handle large volumes of structured data. Data is organized as an ordered key-value store, and you interact with it using API language binding.

Writing on the FoundationDB site, the developers say

"The vision of FoundationDB is to start with a simple, powerful core and extend it through the addition of “layers”. The key-value store, which is open sourced today, is the core, focused on incorporating only features that aren’t possible to write in layers. Layers extend that core by adding features to model specific types of data and handle their access patterns."

They say that the use of layers

"promotes the best practices of scalable and manageable systems."

The idea is that by running multiple layers on a single cluster, so for example a document store layer and a graph layer, when you have a specific application, you can choose the best data model from the availbale layers. The developers hope that by open sourcing the FoundationDB core, the quantity and variety of layers will increase and develop rapidly.

The promise is that all major development will be done in the open, and a design document process has been set up to make sure the work is done transparently and with community input. Developers who contribute to the project will have "a greater voice in the project decision-making".

The source code for FoundationDB is now available on Github, and community forums are available for developers wanting to get involved with the project.

More Information

FoundationDB Site

Related Articles

Apple Buys And Closes FoundationDB 

FoundationDB Version 1.0 Released

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