Introduction of TypeScript-inspired database language, schema management, and new local and cloud development experiences bring state-of-the-art software development practices to operational data
Fauna, the distributed document-relational database delivered as a cloud API, today announced the general availability of their new TypeScript-inspired database language, new web and local development experiences, and the addition of a declarative database schema. Combined, these new capabilities deliver a superior software development experience for teams building and scaling new and existing applications.
The new database language and developer experience unleashes the power of Fauna’s industry-leading distributed, document-relational database. Fauna is used today by 3000+ development teams spanning 180+ countries for user-centric and distributed/edge applications, real-time services, stateful serverless and multi-tenant SaaS offerings.
“Fauna’s distributed, document-relational database provides the flexibility and familiarity of documents with the relationships, multi-region strong consistency and querying power of a relational database. Our API delivery model removes the burden of database operations,” said Eric Berg, CEO of Fauna. “A well-designed database language saves developers time, improves collaboration, and enhances performance. With FQL, the addition of schema management, and new and local cloud development experience, we’re bringing state-of-the-art software development practices to an operational data platform that securely scales without operations or limits.”
New Database Language Inspired by TypeScript
In partnership with hundreds of Fauna and non-Fauna customers, Fauna created an innovative new version of its database language, FQL. The company drew inspiration from popular programming languages like TypeScript. Fauna also leveraged both customer feedback and the best attributes of these languages to create a database language for Fauna that provides a new level of simplicity, expressiveness, and developer productivity while retaining its unique relational querying power across semi-structured data with strictly serialized transactions. FQL is immediately familiar to modern application developers and laser-focused on allowing developers to write clear and concise queries and transactional code for their operational data.
FQL is a strongly typed database language that combines the ability to express declarative queries and functional business logic in strongly consistent transactions. FQL is familiar to developers with prior knowledge of modern programming languages like TypeScript or Python. It is, by nature, composable and modular, allowing developers to query within or across documents using relational operators, encode sophisticated business logic, and dynamically construct JSON-like result shapes that map to what the application requires.
“With FQL, Fauna marries simplicity with power. Now, we can do aggregation and projection more effortlessly than in MongoDB. FQL outshines SQL with minimal effort and complexity,” said Matt Haman, CTO of Rownd.
Customers around the globe are live in production with the language using new lightweight drivers that are available for JavaScript, Python, and GO. Additional drivers for C# and Java will be available soon. Try Fauna and FQL today for free at www.fauna.com
“It is increasingly important for developers to efficiently integrate data into their applications,” said Rachel Stephens, Senior Analyst with RedMonk. “Powerful tools that are simple to use are crucial to this task. With their new query language and investments in Infrastructure as Code (IaC) integrations, Fauna aims to improve developers’ experience and accelerate their productivity.”
Integrated Developer Experience
Fauna also announced its new integrated developer experience spanning a new web shell, command line interface and administrative dashboard, intelligent code completion, a new VS Code Plugin, and a new documentation site.
The new web dashboard minimizes context switching by listing resources (i.e., collections, documents, indexes, and functions) alongside the web code editor on a single page. An integrated web shell features multiple tabs to experiment quickly as you write queries and functions providing a Web IDE for data. It exposes the features you expect, like inline query statistics and changing the security context to test roles and permissions. It also leverages the new FQL features mentioned above, like richer error messages and static types. Both novice and experienced developers can take advantage of simple, guided ways to create documents and indexes, while expert users can work on multiple resources simultaneously in different editor tabs.
Intelligent code completion support is now available and surfaced both in the web shell and with a new plugin for Visual Studio Code. Suggestions are exposed to help developers write queries faster, with methods and types that make sense in the context of your current query code’s cursor location. This functionality leverages the language server protocol standard and will support additional IDEs and other future tools, like code linters.
Spanning the DevOps Lifecycle
Fauna also announced new and upcoming features to enhance its integrated developer experience across the DevOps Lifecycle, starting with a new declarative schema language. Now, developers can define Fauna database components in a single file that can be included alongside their existing application codebase, significantly reducing management and versioning overhead. The functionality supports Fauna’s existing local and test-driven software development capabilities, including a docker container for local development.
The declarative schema language and corresponding API enable automation of the database lifecycle management process by integrating with popular IDEs and providing code checking and error prevention during development. Future integrations with GitHub will automate testing triggered by pushing a new schema version to ensure the integrity of the database. Additional integrations with Infrastructure as Code tools like Terraform will enable automation of the deployment and management of the database infrastructure.
Integrating Fauna and application code management saves developer time and prevents errors by ensuring the consistency of code with the database schema. The additions will make prototyping and iteration of application design faster and more efficient by automating both database schema updates and testing changes.
Unlocking The Power of Fauna
This innovative new version of FQL and seamless developer experience, combined with Fauna’s battle-tested distributed, document relational architecture, enables development teams worldwide to build new, powerful applications faster and scale existing ones with confidence. Fauna’s multi-region architecture, powered by its underlying Distributed Transaction Engine (DTE), provides strong consistency, low latency, and high availability. Fauna’s API delivery model means this is all available to development teams with no database operations required.
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