Hello Terminators!
Happy New Year. 2020 is the year of the Terminator.
It has been a crazy few weeks. We’ve been burning both ends of the candle to get TerminusDB 1.1 and supporting material out into the world.
Big news is the release of TerminusDB 1.1 yesterday - we are calling it The Big Babushka release as it is enourmous. We have a completely new backend, a new Console, extended Web Object Query Language (WOQL), a python client and a pile of new documentation.
As with everything around here, The Big Babushka is a labour of love and we are all really proud of what we’ve built. Check it out, download it, fork it, open a bug report, or contribute some code over on GitHub.
Remember TerminusDB is open source now and forever.
Terminus-store
The major development is our new storage backend, terminus-store. With the introduction of the new store, TerminusDB takes a radical departure from traditional database architectures. Our approach has three parts:
We have a graph database with strong schema to retain simplicity and generality
The graph is implemented using succinct immutable data structures which enable more sparing use of main memory resources
We adopt a delta encoding approach to updates (‘like git, but for data’) which provides the whole suite of revision control features: branch, merge, squash, rollback, blame, and time-travel facilitating CI/CD approaches on data
This final point is crucial — with TerminusDB we can now use advanced CI/CD workflows in data operations. The large impact of git on the software development world can now be envisioned in the world of data. This is made possible by synergies between an immutable layered approach and the succinct data structure approach that we’ve used for encoding. The DevOps revolution becomes the DataOps revolution.
TerminusDB is a practical tool for enabling branch, merge, rollback, and the various automated and manual testing regimes which they facilitate on a transactional database management system while providing sophisticated query support.
Succinct Data Structures and Delta Encoding for Modern Databases (or How we built a Git for Data and Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb)
The other big release of the week was our technical paper on our new backend, which (as mentioned above) is like git, but for data.
It is very impressive step forward in core database architecture.
Full paper is over here.
CowDuck
We were delighted to welcome CowDuck to the TerminusDB family. We think it is a perfect partnership. And so does CowDuck. Mwak, Mwak.