

Realm (YC S11) Announces $20M Series B, 100M Devices After 9 Months - astigsen
http://realm.io/news/9-months/

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pierotofy
Congratulations on the funding. But the "the 2nd-most deployed database in the
world in less than a year" is a little... I don't know. If a popular app
decides to use your database, shouldn't you count that as 1 installation
instead of taking the number of people that will download the popular app? The
comparison doesn't seem fair for non-mobile databases. I would rewrite it as
"the 2nd-most deployed mobile database in the world in less than a year".

~~~
astigsen
Alexander from Realm here. I agree that deployments are not the only (or even
nessesarily most interesting) metric of usage. But it is a good example of how
remarkable mobile growth is. At this point there are just crazily many more
mobile devices out there than there ever was on the backend and server side.

It is an interesting metric for us, given that sqlite has for a long time
(rightfully) claimed to be the most widely deployed datebase in world, which
is also primarily based on their usage on mobile devices.

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zzzhao
Congratulations. Anyone in the HN community have experience using Realm that
they can share? Would love to hear actual experiences from folks here.

~~~
TimOliver
Disclaimer: I presently work for Realm. However, what I've written here is
based on the opinion I formed in the time I spent using the product before I
joined the company.

\---

I've been working on a comic reader app for iOS for about 3 years
([http://icomics.co](http://icomics.co)). Up until last year, I was using Core
Data to persist both metadata information for each comic, as well as per-page
caching information to disk.

Unfortunately, Core Data hit a breaking point with me (I encountered a rather
catastrophic data corruption issue when trying to get it to perform automatic
schema migrations :( ) and, initially as a feasibility test, I decided to try
migrating the whole solution over to using Realm. If it wasn't up to the task,
my backup plan was going to have been moving to raw SQLite (and all the
boilerplate code that that would have required).

Suffice it to say, I was more than impressed with Realm. Since it more or less
followed the same objects model as Core Data, porting my apps entire data
implementation over to it took less than a single evening of work. The API was
ridiculously easy to learn, and I found it much easier to pass data between
threads than what I was needing to do to achieve the same result in Core Data.
It was also VERY satisfying deleting giant swaths of Core Data code. ;)

I was so impressed with the whole process that after that, I held a talk on it
at a local iOS meetup in my city. Afterwards, I uploaded the talk as a video
to YouTube
([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cGptaE2_WEQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cGptaE2_WEQ))
and it was thanks to this video that Realm found me, and how I joined the
company. :)

Realm's been in production use in my app for 5 months now, and I can safely
say it's performed above and beyond my expectations. For iOS projects, I
definitely recommend it. :)

~~~
x0x0
So the key advantages of realm over coredata are speed and correctness, and
over sqlite you don't need an orm layer? Is that fair?

~~~
TimOliver
Yep! That's fair. :)

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infofarmer
Love their «pricing» page!
[http://realm.io/pricing/](http://realm.io/pricing/)

~~~
comrade1
How do they make money, or plan to make money? Enterprise contracts? Hope to
get bought out?

~~~
ph0rque
Says right there:

 _Realm Inc. already generates revenue by selling additional enterprise
products & services around the technology._

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lsb
So how does the data storage part work? I literally browsed for ten minutes
unable to see how the thing stores the data you give it.

~~~
brmunk
Hi, Brian from Realm here. Surely hard to find much info about the internals
yet. We could and should absolutely share more about that in a blog post. And
to be honest we have for a long time wanted to do that, but just prioritized
to enhance the features and support people building apps. We will get back on
that.

~~~
lsb
Can you summarize it in a few sentences? It sounds like you've got interesting
tech under the hood.

~~~
brmunk
I'm not sure I can make it justice in a few words :-) But shortly:

The core has been developed from the ground up in C++ over the last 3 1/2
years. Realm’s efficiency comes from leveraging bit-packing, caching,
vectorization, query algorithm innovations and a zero-copy architecture to
realize gains in memory usage and speed. Data is stored in a single memory
mapped file. It uses copy-on-write MVCC (Multi-Version-Concurrency-Control)
allowing very efficient fully ACID serializable transactions.

The core is exceptionally fast, which we can leverage to make easy to use
API's in the different languages (currently Java, ObjC, Swift and more to
follow) and still maintain a speed and functionality advantage.

