Tobie Morgan Hitchcock is the founder and CEO of SurrealDB. He discusses the immediate high performance expectations market participants place on modern database startups.
“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 this is an incredibly complex product to build, and it takes time as well.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading:
filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard
(the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Tobie Morgan Hitchcock
PredictionDidn’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.”
Tobie Morgan HitchcockOct 3, 2024▶ 38:51Building The Database That Can Do It All | Tobie Morgan Hitchcock, CEO of 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.”
Tobie Morgan HitchcockOct 3, 2024▶ 5:21Building The Database That Can Do It All | Tobie Morgan Hitchcock, CEO of SurrealDB
AssertionNot 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,”
Tobie Morgan HitchcockOct 3, 2024▶ 6:30Building The Database That Can Do It All | Tobie Morgan Hitchcock, CEO of SurrealDB
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.”
Tobie Morgan HitchcockOct 3, 2024▶ 12:23Building The Database That Can Do It All | Tobie Morgan Hitchcock, CEO of SurrealDB
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.”
Tobie Morgan HitchcockOct 3, 2024▶ 26:10Building The Database That Can Do It All | Tobie Morgan Hitchcock, CEO of SurrealDB
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…”
Tobie Morgan HitchcockOct 3, 2024▶ 31:28Building The Database That Can Do It All | Tobie Morgan Hitchcock, CEO of SurrealDB
Made with StarZero
Turn any episode into a week of clips.
This entire site, over 400 conversations transcribed, diarized, checked and made playable,
runs on the StarZero media pipeline. Drop in your own episode and the podcast clipper finds the
moments worth sharing, cuts them, captions them, and reframes them for every feed.
We use essential cookies to make the site work. With your permission we
also use analytics cookies (Google Analytics and Mixpanel) to understand
usage and improve StarZero. See our Cookie Policy.