Show HN: BerylDB – a small key-value database (opens in new tab)

hello YCombinator Community:

I hope everyone is having a great week!!

I'm working on a small key-value database, written in C++ and powered by RocksDB. It started as a hobby, but I am trying to slowly turn it into a stable project.

The project is called BerylDB. A PHP API was released a couple of days ago, and currently working on a NodeJS gateway. I'm super excited about the project and actively improving its functionalities. The server is fully modular, which means that components can be loaded/unloaded as required. In addition to data storage, the server has channels, and clients can subscribe to them. This make it a great solution for real time analytics.

The ultimate goal of this project is to have a community of custom modules that users may be interested on. This may be useful for developers and/or companies requiring specific needs.

I'm open to collaborations! If you happen to have interested in databases, please let me know. I am on Discord. Any kind of collaboration or feedback would be appreciated. If you work for an startup or need high speed performance, please let me know!

Discord: https://discord.gg/H6HVxeDq

Docs: https://docs.beryl.dev/

Server repository: https://github.com/beryldb/beryldb

Client (command line): https://github.com/beryldb/beryldb-cli

PHP API: https://github.com/beryldb/php-beryl

Interested in this project! Ever since Redis become much more than a KV, I've been seeking something a bit simpler. I'll admit, Redis is simple to get stared with, but there is a lot to learn once you do.

What goals does Beryl have, both short and long? Does it aim to compete with Redis? Can you host a cluster of BerylDB instances? What type of benchmarks are you seeing?

Can you compare Beryl with using Rocksdb directly?

What's the advantage of using BerylDB over Redis? Is it speed, or something else in the feature set (current or future)?

I spent a lot of time on the home page wondering if this is a network database server or an embedded database library.

Looks clean and straightforward. Couple of questions...

  <server name="server2.beryl.dev" network="cluster">

It says the network key should be "Name of global network". Not sure what that is, and I don't see anything using it, printing it, etc. What's this for?

Similar question on this:

  <listen address="127.0.0.1" port="6379" type="clients">

What is type? It says it defaults to "clients", but not what that means, what the other choices are, etc.

Similar for "connecting class name". It's not clear what things that drives.

On the PHP api, you're returning 0 when there's a failure. You also return 0 when there is no such key on a get().

That isn't a great idea, since that would mean no discernable difference from

- An error, like a network error

- No such key exists

- Key did exist, and it's value was 0, though I suppose I could test the type with gettype()? Seems odd to return an int instead of a boolean though.

For comparison, the phpredis api raises an exception for errors and returns a boolean false if no such key exists.

Looks interesting! Do you have plans to add aggregations and analytics functions? It seems like you can do simple counting with TOUCH but I didn’t see any SUM etc. Can it run in-memory or just on disk? If in-memory how does it benchmark vs Redis? Thanks and congrats on the launch!

Neat!. Feature request: 1) Please consider adding a rust helper library 2) Please consider making backups and fault-tolerance easier than current solutions

What's the comparison to Redis?

You need Show HN: in the title if this is your own project. Just an FYI.

E: why the downvote?

Reminded me of that other Beryl, remember that thing? Flames on all my windows and lasers when I clicked, rad.