Lowering the barriers databases place in the way of strategy, with RavenDB

If database technologies offered performance, flexibility and security, most professionals would be happy to get two of the three, and they might have to expect to accept some compromises, too. Systems optimised for speed demand manual tuning, while flexible platforms can impose costs when early designs become constraints. Security is, sadly, sometimes, a bolt-on, with DBAs relying on internal teams’ skills and knowledge not to introduce breaking changes.

RavenDB, however, exists because its founder saw the cumulative costs of those common trade-offs, and the inherent problems stemming from them. They wanted a database system that didn’t force developers and administrators to choose.

Abstracting away complexity

Oren Eini, RavenDB’s founder and CTO was working as a freelance database performance consultant nearly two decades ago. In an exclusive interview he recounted how he encountered many capable teams “digging themselves into a hole” as the systems in their care grew in complexity. Problems he was presented with didn’t stem from developers not possessing the required skills, but rather from system architecture. Databases tend to guide their developers towards fragile designs and punish developers for following those paths, he says. RavenDB was a project that began as a way to reduce friction when the unstoppable force of what’s required meets the mountain of database schema.

The platform’s emphasis is on performance and adaptability without (ironically) at some stage requiring the services of people like Oren. Armed with a bag full of experience and knowledge, he formed RavenDB, which has now been shipping for more than fifteen years – well before the current interest in AI-assisted development.

The bottom line is that over time, the RavenDB database adapts to what the organisation cares about, rather than what it guessed it might care about when the database was first spun up. “When I talk to business people,” Eini says, “I tell them I take care of data ownership complexity.”

For example, instead of expecting developers or DBAs to anticipate every possible query pattern, RavenDB observes queries as they are executed. If it detects that a query would benefit from an index, it creates one in the background, with minimal overhead on extant processing. This contrasts with most relational databases, where schema and indexing strategies are set by the initial developers, so are difficult to alter later, regardless of how an organisation may have changed.

Oren draws the comparison with pouring a building’s foundations before deciding where the doors and support columns might go. It’s an approach that can work, but when the business changes direction over the years, the cost of regretting those early decisions can be alarming.

Speaking ahead of the company’s appearance at the upcoming TechEx Global event in London this year (February 4 & 5, Olympia), he cited an example of a European client that…