I suspect the page talking about that might be out of date as in 2018 at a conference about FDB the team were talking about the phasing out of SQLite in favour of their more optimised Redwood storage backend. I would assume that has been completed by now.

Not necessarily. One of the unfortunate problems with FDB is the glacial release process. Check their blog and announcement forums and you'll see the last release they felt worthy of announcing was in 2019. GitHub releases shows an enigmatically named 7.0 release but given it doesn't have any release notes and the website still claims 6.3 is the latest version, it may still not be ready to go yet.

(Disclaimer: affiliated)

Redwood isn't "completed", but it's not unavailable. Evaluating it via `fdbcli> configure ssd-redwood-1-experimental ` is encouraged, but it hasn't seen sufficiently deep evaluation and verification that it's been set as the default ssd storage engine yet.

Not all releases got blog posts. Which ones did honestly had far more to do with the people involved in the releases at the time than any technical merits. This is the first feedback that I've seen where the blog posts were used as a signal of worthiness or stability, so we'll see if we can try to be a bit more responsible about making release posts.

Releases that are posted to the downloads page are all equally considered "ready to go". They appear a bit slower than what gets tagged on github, as the production environments in the core set of companies supporting FDB development are used as the last stage of QA before an official release. (Though this distinction might be less clear as the downloads page was recently redirected to the github release artifacts page.)

You can find the 7.0 release notes at https://github.com/apple/foundationdb/blob/main/documentatio..., which will appear in the documentation once the public site is updated to 7.0 (which happens once the first official, public release is blessed).

All that said, the regular release cadence so far has been about every 6 months, which I think still does qualify as "glacial".

Well, every six months for a core DB engine seems OK. I don't know if I'd describe that as glacial, but the problem is, how would anyone know that without serious investigation? There's a 7.0 release that isn't marked as beta or anything, yet, the release notes can only be found in git under a directory named "sphinx". It's very ambiguous whether this is released or not, which is weird, and doesn't send positive signals about the overall organization and focus of the project. The message it sends is that Apple have no interest in increasing FDB usage outside of Apple, basically, which from an end user's perspective increases risk. What if Apple decide it's time to move on, or close development again? A community of users and devs helps, but that's not going to emerge unless the community is a priority. Maintaining the website/blog would be step one in that process, I'd think.

> One of the unfortunate problems with FDB is the glacial release process.

One person’s “glacial release process” is another’s “stable production-grade database”. Not everything has to rev like an npm library…

There's a balance, though. Three years without an announced release would be a long time even in the enterprise world. It's not like FDB is perfect. The way it handles cross-region replication in particular is not ideal.