FoundationDB opens Apple’s database sauce

FoundationDB opens Apple’s database sauce

FoundationDB has open-sourced a slice of relational-technology employed in Apple’s online services.

The FoundationDB Record Layer is an open source library that provides a record-oriented datastore with semantics similar to a relational database on top of the ACID-compliant FoundationDB key-value store. The code has been released under an Apache 2.0 license.

Record Layer is used by Apple’s CloudKit backend service in iCloud to serve hundreds of millions of online users using a common schema.

It helps move data between an application and iCloud containers and allows millions of discrete database instances to be managed within a single FoundationDB cluster.

FoundationDB was bought by Apple in 2015, with the Mac and idevice maker releasing the code 2018 in order – it said – to build an open-source community.“By open sourcing the FoundationDB core, we expect the quantity and variety of layers to develop rapidly. When we think about the FoundationDB community, we approach it both in terms of the core itself and the ecosystem of layers that it enables,” Apple said at the time here.