Estimated reading time: 3 minutes
Today is a marvelous day for the ArangoDB project and the community behind it.
A couple of minutes ago, the 10,000th stargazer joined the project on GitHub, and we want to send a really big “Thank You!” to each and everyone of you for showing your support.
More infoThe new release of ArangoDB 3.2 is just around the corner and will include some major improvements like distributed graph processing with Pregel or a powerful export tool. But most importantly we integrated Facebook’s RocksDB as the first pluggable storage engine in ArangoDB. With RocksDB you will be able to use as much data in ArangoDB as fits on your disc.
As this is an important change and many questions reached us from the community we wanted to share some answers on the most common questions. Please find them below
Will I be able to go beyond the limit of RAM?
Yes. By defining RocksDB as your storage engine you will be able to work with as much data as fits on your disc.
What is the locking behaviour with RocksDB in ArangoDB?
With ArangoDB 3.0 we reworked the build process to be based completely on cmake. The packaging was partly done using cpack (Windows, Mac), for the rest regular packaging scripts on the SuSE OBS were used. With ArangoDB 3.1 we reworked all packaging to be included in the ArangoDB Source code and use CPack. Users can now easily use that to build their own Packages from the source, as we do with Jenkins. Community member Artur Janke (@servusoft) contributed the new ubuntu snap packaging assisted by Michael Hall (@mhall119). Big thanks for that!
Download packages for Snap Ubuntu Core16.04 Read more
We are fortunate to live in an open-source world with a fairly large international community of users and contributors, which has been only growing more and more in the past year. (Big thanks for that, by the way 😉 ) Especially that we have recently received quite a few requests on how one can contribute to ArangoDB in an easy and quick way, we have decided that the time has come to get closer to our community and get even more involved.
A lot of great ideas came up during a chat with some of our long-term users on how we could improve on that front. Among all others, the most straightforward one is asking the community for some help and support on GitHub. So we took a bit of time to go through open issues and selected a few now tagged ‘Help Wanted’. Here is a selection of easy tasks that will get you started contributing to ArangoDB with code or ideas and concepts for features. It is only a few to start with, but if you want to get involved we would appreciate your helping hand! Read more
In April 2015, Thomas Pfeiffer, a user experience researcher and active open-source contributor, did an interview with one very active member of the ArangoDB community – J Patrick Davenport from Palatka, FL, USA. The aim was to get an idea about the open-source project ArangoDB as a whole and the development process so far – from the perspective of a developer. This interview first appeared in Thomas Pfeiffer sessellift blog on April 27th.
Thomas: Hi Patrick, to start off, could you tell me a little about yourself (your background, the job in which you’re using ArangoDB, …)?
Patrick: About me: I’m a Solutions Architect, working for my own company, DeusDat Solutions. I’ve been working over 8 years as a software Bob Villa (This Old House, American Reference). My clients call me in to renovate code bases that are near collapse. I’ve improved multiple Fortune 500 company’s core business applications. Recently I designed half to the Medicare Fraud Detection System for the US Government. That was based on Hadoop.
As an open-source project we are always happy when we learn about new projects that use ArangoDB and we are thankful for any feedback; on how working with ArangoDB and/or interacting with the team – has helped your projects to develop. If you have a story you want to share, please get in touch.
Recently we have received a nice feedback from Francis (Boostport) that reached us with the launch of his new product. Parts of Boostport are realized using Foxx-JavaScript extensions on ArangoDB:
“I really enjoyed working on ArangoDB. It’s very stable, well-documented and the API docs are very clear, as I use the REST api. Support is also top-notch. Bugs were often fixed hours or days after discovery and in one case, after I submitted an enhancement request for custom AQL functions, Jan implemented them over the next few days.
For me, the most important feature is being able to build custom AQL functions in javascript. This allowed me to easily perform analytics on social data, generate the appropriate views and send them back to the client for consumption. Finally, I also really liked how minimal configuration is needed to get it up and running. As a plus, I like how you can set up replication using the REST interface. :)”
ArangoDB can be used as a backend data source for APIs that you compose with the popular open-source LoopBack Node.js framework.
In a recent blog article on StrongLoop, Nicholas Duffy explains how to use his new loopback-connector-arango connector to access ArangoDB:
Getting Started with the Node.js LoopBack Connector for ArangoDB
The tutorial uses the loopback-connector-arango which is available as npm and a demo application which is available from Github. More info
There is a warm-up routine on every evening at the NYC Database Month. Speakers ask trivia questions to the auditorium, related to the topic of the following talk. The first correct answer wins some “swag”. On Tuesday, Nov. 11, 2014 Max from ArangoDB will talk about Polyglot Persistence and multi-model NoSQL databases.
To get a competitive advantage, here are some questions Max might ask:
Q: What does the term Polyglot Persistence mean?
A: Use a variety of different data storage technologies for different kinds of data. (src: Martin Fowler)
Q: What types on NoSQL data-/ storage-models does ArangoDB support?
A: key/values, documents, graphs
Q: NoSQL often comes with restrictions – which of the following features are missing in ArangoDB: joins, transactions, ACID guarantees?
A: none. (ArangoDB even scales and provides competitive performance)
If you are around NYC, let’s grab a seat and watch Max on stage: http://www.databasemonth.com/database/polyglot-persistence
Can’t be there? Then here’s your chance. Be the first to answer the following question in the comments below and get a new ArangoDB t-shirt:
Q: How many different programming languages are supported by ArangoDB?
