Prediction Didn’t hold up
Hitchcock: SurrealDB will be the first database with multi-model time travel
“We will be the first database that enables you to time travel in your data in the different types of models that you can work with in SurrealDB.”
Opinion
Hitchcock: Firebase is a data platform, not a true database
“It's not really a database, it's what I would call a data platform or a data layer.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Hitchcock developed the SurrealDB codebase alone over seven years
“So it's just one person, and it was seven years in the making,”
Insight
Hitchcock: Rewriting a database entirely in Rust beats incremental migration
“What you'll see with other databases is they then design parts of it in Rust, and then gradually more and more that becomes Rust over time, and maybe some of it doesn't, but it's much easier when you go forward from the basis of everything is built in Rust.”
Insight
Hitchcock: Managing multiple specialized database backends degrades overall system performance
“And actually, if you're doing that, With three or four different database backends that can become incredibly complicated, The performance can degrade over time as well, or just be harder to reach because you're working with different platforms.”
Insight
Hitchcock: Microservices simplify initial code but introduce massive systemic complexity
“Everyone built microservice-based architectures because that was the easiest thing to do. It meant that you could keep components of your code small, and you could, you build up your application from there. But it also led to a large, massive amount of complex…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Hitchcock: Most database startups focus on incremental fixes over reimagining architecture
“A lot of people, as I said at the very beginning, you know, a lot of organizations are focused on improving the performance of an analytical database, or reducing the cost of an analytical database, or adding some functionality to an alternative product that's…”
Insight
Graph data is the optimal way to query data going forward
“To be honest, I think graph data is really the way that we should be querying the data going forward. Ultimately, the world is not modeled according to tables or tabular data. It's modeled according to relationships and links between, between data.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Hitchcock: SurrealDB reduces developer costs by consolidating database types
“So CeruleDB is reimagining databases, so effectively the tool that people use to store data, and then once they've stored it, to query that data. The thing about CeruleDB is it makes it much simpler in terms of querying that data, and it means that you can Red…”
What-if
Hitchcock: Traditional database engineers rarely rewrite backends from scratch
“If you were to have come from a database background, you probably wouldn't say, yup, we'll rewrite the entire database backend.”
Assertion Contradicted
Hitchcock: No existing database was designed for historical temporal querying
“There's not a single, really a single database out there designed in that specific way to be able to do that”
Disclosure
Hitchcock: SurrealDB completely rewrote its original codebase from Golang to Rust
“And so, we made the decision to completely rewrite the entire codebase from Golang into Rust.”
Assertion Supported
Hitchcock: SurrealDB runs embedded, single-node, or as a distributed cluster
“So SurrealDB can run as an embedded database, like SQLite. It can run as a single node, like Postgres. Or it can run as a distributed cluster, and you can scale the storage layer, and you can scale the compute layer.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Hitchcock: Dedicated in-memory graph databases will always outpace multi-model engines
“If you're dealing with graph data that all sits inside memory and it's being stored in a graph data structure, then that's always going to be quicker on a graph database that is sitting on a single node.”
Assertion Supported
Hitchcock: SurrealDB allows users to run AI models directly inside databases
“One of the pieces of functionality we have in CeruleeB is the ability to bring a model right inside the database so that you can run that model. It's a custom trade model or an off-the-shelf model. You can run that model right alongside your data.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Hitchcock: Enterprises adopt SurrealDB for isolated problems, not to replace systems
“They're not coming to us and saying, I'm going to replace four different databases that I've spent the last 10 years implementing. It's usually being able to solve one problem to begin with, and that problem is usually that they're having to work with many dif…”
Disclosure
Hitchcock: SurrealDB avoids PostgreSQL limitations by not building on top of it
“We're not building on top of Postgres and therefore limited by what Postgres has to offer.”
Insight
Hitchcock: Users expect new databases to immediately match twenty-year-old incumbents
“The outside world can love you and hate you at the same time. So they can love what you're building, but at the same time they expect you to be where a 20 year old database is in terms of functionality or performance, and I think sometimes people forget that t…”
Insight
Hitchcock: Technical startups cannot rely on engineering quality without brand identity
“In any organization, but also importantly in a startup as well, you can't just focus on the brand, or you can't just focus on the tech, you have to focus on both. For Surreal to be successful, we have to be an incredible technological product, and we have to h…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Multi-level graph queries are extremely hard to run in MongoDB or SQL
“So this type of query in a relational database or something like MongoDB is going to be very hard to run. You've got a lot of joins and you've got very complicated queries.”
Assertion Supported
Hitchcock: SurrealDB is built entirely in Rust
“CeruleDB, the entirety of CeruleDB is built in Rust.”
What-if
Hitchcock: I would not have started SurrealDB knowing it takes ten years
“Probably not. Definitely not. No, definitely not.”
