Database House Wants You to Stop Dropping ACID

NoSQL databases have made it possible to store more data faster and cheaper than ever before. Web giants like Google, Amazon and Facebook have come to depend on them in a big way. But they have some fundamental drawbacks that prevent them from handling many software applications. And FoundationDB wants to change that.

FoundationDB is the company behind the new proprietary database of the same name, and it claims to offer the performance benefits of NoSQL without many of the well-known trade-offs. The product has been available to a small group of alpha testers since January 2012, but on Monday, the company is making it available to the world at large.

The NoSQL movement grew out of papers published in 2006 and 2007 by Amazon and Google that described data storage systems distributed across hundreds or even thousands of cheap servers. These papers inspired open source imitators like Cassandra, Hbase, and Riak. But to achieve the mammoth scale that they did, these databases had to break with an old database tradition called “ACID.”

ACID stands for “atomicity, consistency, isolation, durability.” Together, these properties ensure that when you make a change to a database — or a series of changes — those changes are either recorded reliably and permanently or rejected completely.

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