Fungible is a funny word, mostly because you are most likely familiar with the term from NFT (non-fungible tokens) and other similar scams. At its core, it is the idea that for certain things, the instance doesn’t matter, just the amount. The classic example is that if I lend you a 50$ bill, and you give me back two 20$ bills and a 10$ bill, you gave me back my money. That is even though you very clearly didn’t. I didn’t get the same physical 50$ paper bill back, I got bills for that same amount. On the other hand, if I give you my dog for the weekend, I would be quite upset if I got it back t ..read more

RavenDB is going to take part in the DevWeek hackathon in February. The hackathon is now live and we offer prizes worth 4,000 USD for the top two winners. The hackathon is available for both attendees of the DevWeek conference as well as the general public. The challenge we put forth is building a sharing platform in a community. I’m excited to see what kind of solutions will be submitted. I’m also to be personally at the DevWeek conference and would be very happy to meet you in person. Happy hacking! The post RavenDB Hackaton at DevWeek appeared first on RavenDB NoSQL Database ..read more

I spoke with Jaime recently in the Modern .NET Podcast: In this episode of The Modern .NET Show podcast, Oren Eini, a seasoned developer with over 20 years of experience in the .NET field, discussed the evolution of the .NET framework and the complexities that come with it. Eini highlighted the rapid pace of change in the language, from the introduction of generics at version 2.0 to switch expressions and pattern matching in the latest versions. While these new features allow for more concise code, Eini acknowledged that they also increase the scope and complexity of learning C# from scratch ..read more

One of the most frequent operations we make in RavenDB is getting a page pointer. That is the basis of pretty much everything that you can think of inside the storage engine. On the surface, that is pretty simple, here is the API we’ll call: public Page GetPage ( long pageNumber ) Easy, right? But internally, we need to ensure that we get the right page. And that is where some complexity enters the picture. Voron, our storage engine, implements a pattern called MVCC (multi version concurrency control). In other words, two transactions loading the same page may see different versions of the pag ..read more

I recently talked about how RavenDB is now using ZStd as the default compression algorithm for backups. That led to a reduction both in the amount of storage we are consuming for backups and a significantly reduction in the time to actually run the backups. We have been exploring where else we can get those benefits and the changes were recently released in RavenDB 6.0.2. RavenDB now supports ZStd for HTTP compression, which you can control using the DocumentConventions.HttpCompressionAlgorithm. You can find all the gory details about the performance impact in the release announcement here. T ..read more

This was actually released a while ago, I was occupied with other matters and missed that. I had a blast talking with Carl & Richard about data sharding and how we implemented that in RavenDB. What is data sharding, and why do you need it? Carl and Richard talk to Oren Eini about his latest work on RavenDB, including the new data sharding feature. Oren talks about the power of sharding a database across multiple servers to improve performance on massive data sets. While a sharded database is typically in a single data center, it is possible to distribute the shards across multiple locatio ..read more

Me and Jaime had a really good discussion about RavenDB, why I took the time to create his own NoSql database engine, and the fact that I built it using .NET Core before it was released (back in the pre-1.0 days, when it was known as dnx), and some of the optimisation stories that he worked on when creating RavenDB. Along the way, we cover what the GC (or garbage collector) is, performance issues to look out for when dealing with large JSON objects, and some tips that he has for those who want to optimise their applications. You can listen to it here. Would love your feedback. The post Recordi ..read more

Today I had a meeting to go over the 2024 budget, and we run into one of the most important line times. Our coffee budget. You know the old adage about: Coders are turning Coffee into Code, right? Certainly true in our case, in 2023 we spend a large 5 figures sum on coffee alone. And 2024 is shaping up to be even more expensive. Happy new year! The post I was working on the 2024 budget numbers, and… appeared first on RavenDB NoSQL Database ..read more

If you are reading this blog, I assume that you are a like minded person. My idea of relaxation is to sit and write code. Hopefully on something that I’m not familiar with. I have many such blog post series that cover a topic I care about. It’s my idea of meditation. For the end of 2023, I thought that we can do something similar but more broadly. A while ago Alex Klaus wrote a walkthrough on how to build a complete application from scratch using modern best practices (and RavenDB). We refreshed the code and made it broadly available so you can have something that is fun, educational and produ ..read more

With the release of RavenDB 6.0, we are now starting to focus on smaller features. The first one out of the gate, part of RavenDB 6.0.1 release, is actually a set of enhancements around making backups faster, smaller and cheaper. I just checked, and the core backup behavior of RavenDB hasn’t changed much since 2010(!). In other words, decisions that were made almost 14 years ago are still in effect. There have been a… number of changes in both RavenDB, its operating environment and the size of the database that we deal with. In the past year, we ran into a number of cases where people working ..read more