Fauna Announces Polyglot APIs for its Global Transactional Database

SAN FRANCISCO, April 9, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Fauna, provider of the groundbreaking distributed OLTP database FaunaDB, announced expansion of its query interface with market-leading standard APIs to further boost developer productivity. Developers using FaunaDB will now be able to manipulate data directly using best-in-class query languages such as GraphQL for web applications, as well as CQL for key-value access and SQL for relational workloads. The additional languages will appear as native endpoints within both FaunaDB Cloud and FaunaDB Enterprise, and will not require any additional software to be managed by the developer.

FaunaDB's unique multi-model approach enables businesses to model any type of data – relational, document, graph and temporal paradigms – in one database system. The new APIs enable developers to access all of their data from any of the supported query languages, unlike other polyglot systems that require duplication of the underlying data. 

"Native GraphQL support in FaunaDB is a game-changer for our customers," said Matt Biilmann, CEO at Netlify. "FaunaDB Cloud is the ideal data platform for serverless and single-page apps, and GraphQL is the ideal data API. Nothing beats the operational simplicity and global performance of Netlify and FaunaDB GraphQL when it comes to modern web projects with dynamic data."

With support for a rich set of APIs such as GraphQL, CQL and SQL, FaunaDB Cloud will offer one of the most versatile cloud database services in the market. Serverless, global, and multi-cloud, FaunaDB Cloud will allow developers to use any language to access any of their data, thereby unlocking new levels of productivity for application development at scale.

"We've delivered the only cloud-first database with mainframe-class reliability and safety in the market. Offering access to the power of the platform from standard APIs was always the next step in our journey," said Evan Weaver, CEO of Fauna. "The platform approach makes it easy for developers to capture the benefits of operational simplicity, horizontal scalability and transactional consistency. We're now bringing the full power of the Calvin protocol and FaunaDB's innovations to each of these APIs."

Unlike other systems with API layers that reimplement underlying features for each dialect, polyglot APIs in FaunaDB leverage common database capabilities to offer developers uniform access to transactional consistency, user authorization, data access, quality of service (QoS) and temporal storage.

Consistency: FaunaDB offers the highest consistency levels for its transactions. These strong consistency guarantees are automatically applied to all polyglot APIs.

Authorization: Unlike most databases that control access at a table level, FaunaDB provides access control at a row (document) level. This fine-grained access control is applicable to all APIs, be it GraphQL or SQL.

Shared Data Access: Data written by one API (e.g. GraphQL) can be read and modified by another API (e.g. SQL). This is in stark contrast with databases that limit APIs to their specific datasets.

QoS: FaunaDB's built-in prioritization policies for concurrent workloads are enforced at the database level or with access keys. All API access automatically adheres to these QoS definitions.

Temporality: FaunaDB is the only database in the market that provides built-in temporality support with no limits on data history. With per-query snapshots, any API (e.g. SQL) in FaunaDB can return data at any given time.

Automating and Streamlining Developer Productivity

GraphQL allows developers to specify the shape of the data they need, without requiring changes to the backend components that provide that data. This enables teams to collaborate more smoothly – so backend teams can focus on security and business logic, and front-end teams can focus on presentation and usability. In this way, GraphQL has emerged as a critical layer for universal database access.

With FaunaDB's GraphQL API, developers no longer need to create a database schema or write time-consuming resolver functions; rather, a GraphQL schema definition file is all that is needed to get started. Once developers import the schema definition in FaunaDB, all required database objects and functions are automatically generated. This automation tremendously boosts developer productivity as it significantly reduces the time developers spend in schema design and development.

Achieve Scale and Consistency without the Complexity

Cassandra is a first-generation NoSQL platform that has seen adoption across many large enterprises because it delivers geo-distributed horizontal scalability. However, Cassandra's inherent lack of strong data consistency and the operational overhead of running and maintaining globally distributed Cassandra clusters have been a deterrent to adoption for mission-critical and cloud-based use cases.

Support for CQL in FaunaDB enables enterprises to rely on a single system to achieve globally consistent geo-distribution of data as well as scale without complexity.

Modernizing Enterprise Apps for the Cloud

SQL has long been the lingua franca for traditional enterprise applications. With digital transformation driving cloud adoption within the enterprise, application development continues to rely on SQL for a vast majority of enterprise workloads. However, options for cloud-centric SQL databases that offer strong consistency and resilience guarantees available in mainframe-like environments are limited.

FaunaDB's support for SQL enables enterprises and digital businesses alike to gain from the productivity of prevalent skills in SQL while leveraging cloud platforms without sacrificing the transactional safety enterprises are accustomed to. Announced earlier this month, an independent database benchmark conducted by Jepsen demonstrated that FaunaDB offers the strongest possible consistency guarantees for distributed and cloud environments.

Availability
The GraphQL API is available immediately in FaunaDB cloud. The CQL API will be available in Q2, and support for SQL will be available later this year. 

About Fauna
FaunaDB is the Relational NoSQL database that guarantees data correctness without operational complexity. Scalable, secure, transactional, global, multi-cloud, multi-tenant, temporal, and highly available, FaunaDB is designed to support digital enterprises in the 21st century and beyond. Vertical industry leaders in financial services, ecommerce, gaming, and SaaS have deployed FaunaDB to support identity management, distributed ledgers, shared services, mobile APIs, and other use cases. Founded in 2012 by the team that scaled Twitter, Fauna is based in San Francisco and Boston, and funded by Point72 Ventures, CRV, Data Collective, and Quest Venture Partners, with strategic investment from GV (formerly Google Ventures, a division of Alphabet), Capital One Growth Ventures, and LINE Corporation. For more information visit fauna.com or follow us at @fauna.

SOURCE Fauna, Inc.

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