
ArangoDB Closes 2.2M Euro Investment Led by Target Partners - reactor
https://www.arangodb.com/2016/11/arangodb-closes-2-2-million-euro-investment-led-target-partners/
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Simran-B
Awesome news! Did not know know about this new investment as a remote-working
member of the team until now. Looking forward to the future, what we can
achieve in the coming months.

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osullivj
Why will ArangoDB succeed where RethinkDB failed commercially? Can't see any
mention of changefeeds on the Arango website, which is the killer Rethink
feature for me.

~~~
roflc0ptic
ArangoDB is a multi model store, which is to say it lets you store key value
pairs, json documents, and graphs. (Edges are just another document with two
special fields: "_from" and "_to".

My team just spent 3 weeks investigating document stores and ultimately
settled on arangoDB because: 1. Graph functionality, 2. Read after write
consistency, 3. Partial updates, 4. Efficient joins across shards, 5. The
(limited) text search features, 6. AQL is just pretty sweet. There was a whole
spreadsheet matrix but that's what I can remember without pulling it up.

We really liked RethinkDB for its change feeds. We are probably going to use
Elastic for search, because we want to expose Lucene to our users, so we'll
probably have to write some foxx endpoints to manage the data replication. I
like the idea of foxx but really hate that it's JavaScript based. I'm planning
on looking into using ScalaJS if possible.

~~~
pluma
Hi, I'm Alan from the ArangoDB JavaScript team.

It should be possible to use ScalaJS with Foxx as long as it is transpiled in
advance and produces node-compatible modules (i.e. something that can be
consumed by and can consume other node modules using `require`). I've heard of
other people successfully using Babel, TypeScript and even ClojureScript with
Foxx.

~~~
roflc0ptic
Aw yeah! While I have you - has any progress been made on a correct write
ahead log APIacross shards? I saw a post from mid 2015 about it, but didn't
see anything after. Would really like to be able to write an elastic river-
type tool for search.

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pluma
I'm not entirely sure what you mean. If you can point me in the direction of
the article you mentioned, maybe one of the developers who are more intimately
familiar with the cluster internals can take a stab at it?

~~~
roflc0ptic
Haha that's fair. I was being a little lazy because I'm writing this from a
kayak on Rainbow River. This is the thread where I got my rather limited info.
:)
[https://groups.google.com/forum/m/#!topic/arangodb/ModsM74K1...](https://groups.google.com/forum/m/#!topic/arangodb/ModsM74K1zA)

If it makes sense to take off thread, my email is daniel.porter@pwc.com.
Thanks so much for sharing your knowledge!

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pluma
The question makes more sense in context, but I'm not familiar enough with the
WAL to be able to answer myself. When you're back on dry land, maybe you can
join us in the Community Slack:
[https://slack.arangodb.com](https://slack.arangodb.com)

We have a dedicated #cluster channel were you will probably have better luck
getting detailed answers to technical questions. :)

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Harrisburg
Congratulations to the team! Happy to hear that you guys are going further.
Looking forward to see what the future brings.

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solisoft
Great news ! ArangoDB is awesome ... Foxx is a very powerful tool for building
micro services.

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iamed2
Looks like they were planning to Jepsen test later this year [0]. But it looks
like they're preparing to run it themselves [1]?

[0]: [https://www.arangodb.com/2016/05/getting-closer-
arangodb-3-0...](https://www.arangodb.com/2016/05/getting-closer-
arangodb-3-0-alpha-release/)

[1]:
[https://github.com/arangodb/jepsen/commit/2b79809df73ca6c755...](https://github.com/arangodb/jepsen/commit/2b79809df73ca6c755ebe41a92f2b436860532b0)

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don71
I'm an ArangoDB team member. We are starting with our own Jepsen tests. But we
will ask Aphyr as soon as possible to do an official test. In the meantime can
the community check our implementation.

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segmondy
It most certainly makes sense to jepsen Arango before asking the public to do
so. But I won't take your tests without a grain of salt till Aphyr does so. ;)
Best of luck

~~~
don71
As far as I know is Aphyer booked for months. We will do our best.

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g0d0
I'm curious on the graph database claims - how is this different to MongoDB
using _from/_to attributes to represent edges? It certainly looks better than
MongoDB in all other aspects (though to improve on MongoDB would not be
difficult!).

How will it get the performance of a Neo4J,Titan et al. with this model? Does
it index them specially?

Seems odd to ignore Gremlin and OpenCypher just to have a proprietary / "yet
another standard" graph query language.

~~~
pluma
There's a general comparison on our website: [https://www.arangodb.com/why-
arangodb/arangodb-vs-mongodb/](https://www.arangodb.com/why-arangodb/arangodb-
vs-mongodb/)

One major difference is that ArangoDB has full support of transactions across
collections. Also while MongoDB now has limited graph functionality, ArangoDB
is actually optimized for graph queries and can do arbitrary traversals and
joins very efficiently.

The problem with Gremlin/OpenCypher is that they are primarily designed as
graph query languages. ArangoDB takes a multi-model approach and many ArangoDB
users focus on documents first and add in graph queries as an optimization
step as their products mature. AQL is designed to be very easy to learn and
mixes the document and graph paradigms seamlessly, embracing the multi-model
nature of the database.

Personally I think that starting with a blank slate was the right choice
compared to other multi-model databases that have found it necessary to extend
a subset of a standard query language with their own proprietary additions to
achieve the same goals.

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mcncfie
I have a lot of faith in multi-model datastores but I'm a little worried about
the Jepsen test post below. Is that true?

~~~
ted_dunning
What is it that worried you? That the team is going to check things over to
make sure that they have things done right?

The only alternative to that is to just kind of pretend that it all works
without doing the hard work to verify. You saw how that ended up for a lot of
other systems that Kyle has tested.

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runeks
I'm interested in knowing how similar ArangoDB is to Google Cloud Datastore in
functionality and scalability.

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daoudat
Congratulations! ArangoDB is a great database.

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jongar_xyz
Until it goes under like RethinkDB and we are screwed. One should not use a
non-established, open-source DB.

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asenna
It takes time and money for an open-source DB to become established. I think
Arango is taking the right steps and this investment will help a lot in
getting there.

PS: I only started using ArangoDB recently for the first time on a client
project and it was refreshing to say the least. Being able to do complex
joins, coming from a Mongo environment feels so much better.

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mrmrcoleman
Congrats!

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arrmn
Do you support any type of debugging in foxx, can I somehow set breakpoints
and inspect the state?

We're currently using Arango and it gets tedious to call foxx-manager replace
every time I'm doing a change on the db

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fceller
You can active the dev mode for a Foxx app. This way any change will be
directly visible without the need of replace.

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crudbug
congratulations.

Is there plan to support gremlin query natively ?

~~~
fceller
We are closely monitoring the development. Not being a Java database, we
cannot run Java queries natively. Tinkerpop3 has added some hooks for non-
Java, but it would still very hard to get the speed of AQL. But I hope that
Tinkerpop will open up to non-Java even more.

~~~
crudbug
Thanks. I understand the Tinkerpop JVM stack issue. They should have a native
port as well.

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g0d0
I give it a year before it collapses like a flan in a cupboard. No way it has
3,000 companies using it as per the press release.

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vegabook
why do we need this? Mongo (3.4) is now doing graph and will also (obviously)
do document and key-value. Is there something special about the storage
engine, for example, that will make this awesome for range queries (contiguous
location ala RIAK TS or Cassandra rows)? Does it optimize for the new SSD
controllers that have order of magnitude higher random read throughputs? Does
it leverage GPU RAM? Does it occupy some barren area of the CAP triangle?

Does it do something new, or is it just another neat query language on top of
the same old storage algos? The "3-in-one" pitch doesn't fly for me unless the
underlying storage tech does something special.

~~~
don71
I'm an ArangoDB team member. The new graphLookup is far away to be a graph
functionality. It's only a recursive lookup. Yes, the storage is special. The
three data models are combined in one database core.

