Write unifyDB dev diary #0

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+#lang pollen
+
+◊(define-meta title "UnifyDB Dev Diary 0: I’m building a database!")
+◊(define-meta published "2020-08-09")
+
+Phew, it’s been a while! Over a year, in fact. And what a wild year! Lots of good things happened: I got married, got a new job that I love, moved to a nice new apartment. Also some not-so-nice things, but since you are all living through 2020 just like me I don’t think I need to go into those. But I have still found some side-project time, and I’d like to start talking about what I’m building.
+
+So – I’m excited to announce that I’m building a database! I’m calling it unifyDB. It’s going to be a general-purpose database with some pretty interesting properties:
+
+◊ul{
+    ◊li{It maintains a complete history of changes to all entities stored in the database}
+    ◊li{You can make queries for historical data, e.g. “what did this user record look like last Tuesday?”}
+    ◊li{Arbitrary metadata can be attached to transactions – for example, you can add an application user ID to every transaction your app makes}
+    ◊li{Fine-grained access control is built into the database, allowing developers to limit access to particular attributes across all entities}
+}
+
+This is the database that I’ve always wanted – basically, I’m tired of being in meetings where the boss says “who changed this user’s email address?” and everyone just looks at each other and shrugs.
+
+I’m designing unifyDB to be as modular as possible – I want it to be as easy to run it as a single node on your local machine as it is to run in an autoscaling cluster on your cloud of choice.
+
+I’ve actually been working on this on and off for over a year. The code lives in ◊link[#:href "https://github.com/unifydb/unifydb" #:target "_blank"]{a GitHub repository}. Fair warning: it’s mostly undocumented and nowhere close to being finished. So far, I’ve written the query engine, the transaction handler, the web server (yes, it has an HTTP interface), and a bunch of underlying infrastructure. So as it currently stands, unifyDB is able to store data (in-memory since I haven’t built the storage layer yet) and issue history-aware queries. I’m in the middle of writing the authentication mechanism. After that, it’s on to the storage layer, then most likely the access control layer.
+
+I’m going to start publishing monthly development diaries detailing the more interesting aspects of database. I’ll start with a post about the query system implementation sometime in the next couple of weeks. Sound interesting? Follow along ◊link[#:href "https://feedly.com/i/subscription/feed%2Fhttps%3A%2F%2Fjeremydormitzer.com%2Fblog%2Ffeed.xml" #:target "_blank"]{on Feedly} or ◊link[#:href "https://jeremydormitzer.com/blog/feed.xml" #:target "_blank"]{your RSS reader of choice}!.
+
+In the meantime, if you want to know more about unifyDB or just want to geek out, hit me up ◊link[#:href "https://twitter.com/jeremydormitzer" #:target "_blank"]{on Twitter}.