TIL - YouTrack was first released in 2009, Kotlin in 2011, so I wouldn't call it long before, but definitely before. Guess I'm more interested in programming languages than in task management tools, that's probably why I have been aware of Kotlin longer than of YouTrack...
I've always been curious about graph DBs and dabbled a bit in them, but for those who have more extensive experience in them-- are they really worth it? Is it that for small scale SQL is better and graph DBs really only matter at scale, or for specific use cases with highly connected data?
I wonder if there's a design decision documented somewhere that makes the existing graph databases like Neo4j, etc. not good enough for Youtrack's use case.
Neo4j is a great DB but their license price is egregious for enterprise customers. A few years ago I was involved in negotiating a contract for a small/medium size kubernetes deployment (think around 25 cores) and the annual price was more than the salary of a senior SWE full-time equivalent. See this page for an idea of their prices in 2018: https://blog.igovsol.com/2018/01/10/Neo4j-Commercial-Prices....
Also embedding Neo4j is not possible, that seems to be the killer feature for YouTrackDB, they even shade dependencies so it’s like a no deps Java library for your application.
> small/medium size kubernetes deployment (think around 25 cores
That's ~1 machine. 1 SWE for a database isn't egregious, databases provide huge value, but for that little performance, that's crazy.
I can only assume as core count has blown up over the last 10 years, the pricing has somewhat diminished, but still, I'd be expecting a heck of a lot more capacity for 1 SWE.
Not just that, if a database company has both a community edition and enterprise then it’s likely the enterprise will get many new features that the community edition will never get.
Didn't Neo4J pivot away from being a boring embedded DB which you point at a path and then traverse through Node objects, and decide to become some kind of paid platform with a client-server protocol and proprietary query DSL?
I remembered it from a uni course (early 10s?) a few years ago for a use-case we didn't end up pursuing, but I wasn't hugely comfortable with investing effort into what I saw.
That's true, although, if you look at them, you wouldn't notice. The only mention of JVM you can see in the IDEs is in the About dialog, and the IDEs install and run their own OpenJDK, so no JVM has to be installed globally. Almost as if they were a bit self-conscious about using such an "unsexy" architecture...
Object databases routinely go away and routinely come back.
Ten years ago I worked with a database called Versant OODBMS (from Actian). I was a junior sysadmin so i was essentially administering it at a very surface level but skimming the documentation (and trying some of the samples) it was very cool that you could pick essentially any random class, implement an interface (and hence a few method) and that was it, you had a database-serializable object.
The main issue was really scaling out (as in, multiple machines) but otherwise was a really great database.
- custom app security
- social media
I also think cypher is a brilliant way to query a graph.
That's ~1 machine. 1 SWE for a database isn't egregious, databases provide huge value, but for that little performance, that's crazy.
I can only assume as core count has blown up over the last 10 years, the pricing has somewhat diminished, but still, I'd be expecting a heck of a lot more capacity for 1 SWE.
Ongoing enshittification risk.
I remembered it from a uni course (early 10s?) a few years ago for a use-case we didn't end up pursuing, but I wasn't hugely comfortable with investing effort into what I saw.
It’s JetBrains who were synonymous with Java so not a surprise, if was a recent project would have been Kotlin (which this company created)
Ten years ago I worked with a database called Versant OODBMS (from Actian). I was a junior sysadmin so i was essentially administering it at a very surface level but skimming the documentation (and trying some of the samples) it was very cool that you could pick essentially any random class, implement an interface (and hence a few method) and that was it, you had a database-serializable object.
The main issue was really scaling out (as in, multiple machines) but otherwise was a really great database.