Author: Chris Anderson
Date: April 25, 2019
Originally published on the Fauna blog.
Fauna is proud to announce that Dr. Andy Pavlo, Assistant Professor in the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University, has joined as a technical advisor. Andy’s deep expertise in database query processing systems will play an important role in the development of FaunaDB’s SQL capabilities. At Fauna, he joins notable database expert Daniel Abadi, Darnell-Kanal Professor of Computer Science at the University of Maryland, in helping build a globally distributed database optimized for cloud environments.
FaunaDB is the first enterprise distributed database to leverage Professor Abadi’s work on the Calvin protocol. This protocol provides the mathematical basis for FaunaDB’s globally replicated ACID transactions, allowing FaunaDB clusters to operate correctly regardless of wall clock time. This means that FaunaDB is robust and correct, even in chaotic cloud deployments.
According to a recent report by Jepsen, FaunaDB offers strict-serializability, the gold standard for transactional consistency. This isolation level makes FaunaDB suitable for mission critical workloads like financial ledgers, booking and hospitality markets, and customer identity management, where data integrity is paramount.
Building on this foundation, FaunaDB is now adding polyglot APIs including GraphQL, CQL and SQL to interact with a shared set of data, while preserving all the core correctness, quality of service, and security guarantees that FaunaDB offers. We look forward to collaborating with Dr. Pavlo and leveraging his expertise in query processing to innovate at the database interface layer. Our goal is to deliver a database that serves different developer needs without sacrificing the foundational correctness, scale and reliability that are table stakes for an operational database.
“I am impressed with the work Fauna has done in developing and delivering a distributed database based on Dr. Abadi’s groundbreaking research on Calvin,” said Pavlo. “FaunaDB combines the flexibility and agility of first-generation NoSQL systems with the strong transactional reliability guarantees of enterprise relational DBMSs. To be sure, this is not an easy engineering feat. Its use of Calvin’s deterministic concurrency control protocol to maintain consistency is unique to the industry and solves the notoriously difficult challenges of operating in multi-cloud environments.”
Read the full press release here.
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