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Minseok Kim
Minseok Kim

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Actionbase: One Database for Likes, Views, and Follows

#opensource #database #webdev #architecture

Every social platform needs the same features — likes, views, follows, bookmarks. And every team builds them from scratch, hitting the same walls: fan-out writes, slow counts, inconsistent reads.

Actionbase is an open-source database that treats user interactions as a first-class data model. It exposes a REST API — just HTTP calls to read and write. It's been serving 1M+ requests per minute in production at Kakao, the company behind KakaoTalk.

The Problem

A simple "like" button touches more than you'd think:

  • Did this user already like this post? → edge lookup
  • How many likes does this post have? → count
  • Show all posts this user liked, newest first → scan

With a general-purpose database, you're computing these on every read. At scale, that means slow queries, cache invalidation headaches, and duplicated logic across teams.

How Actionbase Works

Every interaction is modeled as a graph edge:

user-123 → like   → post-456
user-123 → follow → user-789
user-123 → view   → product-012
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Who did what to which target.

When a write comes in, Actionbase precomputes all derived data — forward edges, reverse edges, indexes, and counts — in a single operation. Reads are just lookups.

Quick Start

Actionbase Quick Start CLI demo

docker run -it ghcr.io/kakao/actionbase:standalone
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Runs server (port 8080) in background, CLI in foreground. Load sample data:

load preset likes
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This creates 3 edges:

Alice ── likes ──> Phone
Bob ──── likes ──> Phone
Bob ──── likes ──> Laptop
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Query — precomputed, just read:

get --source Alice --target Phone               # Alice → Phone
scan --index recent --start Bob --direction OUT  # Bob's likes
scan --index recent --start Phone --direction IN # Phone's likers
count --start Alice --direction OUT              # 1
count --start Phone --direction IN               # 2
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See It in Action

What does it look like in a real app? Here's a social media demo powered by Actionbase — likes, follows, feeds, all backed by precomputed reads.

Actionbase Demo

What's Next

This is the first post in the Actionbase Stories series. Upcoming posts will cover patterns for adopting Actionbase into real running systems — from gradual migration to async processing to CQRS integration.

Actionbase wasn't built complete from day one. It was deployed early and evolved under production pressure — surviving incidents, earning trust, and adding verification layers along the way. Those stories are coming too.

GitHub: kakao/actionbase

Feedback welcome — issues, discussions, or comments here.

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