Show HN: Appendable – Index JSONL data and query via CDN

kevmo314.github.io

8 points

2 years ago

Hi HN! A friend and I were inspired by projects like https://github.com/sql-js/sql.js and the idea of querying files served over CDN with HTTP range requests. We started thinking: what would a database that was specifically designed for this type of use case look like? So we started building one, and we landed on a functional prototype that we're pretty proud of!

With our prototype, Appendable, we're able to serve and query large (GB+) datasets by hosting them on a static file host like Amazon S3 or Cloudflare R2 without running a separate server and worrying about things like tail latency, replication, and connection pooling -- all that is handled for us by the file hoster.

Additionally, one tenet that we have been following is Appendable won't touch your underlying data, so your jsonl file is preserved and we point at that data instead of consuming it into an Appendable-specific file format. This keeps your data yours and makes it easy to introspect the data: just open it up with your favorite editor aka vim.

We're curious what you think, we're excited to build this out further to get the performance even better and add features like pubsub. Everything is open source at https://github.com/kevmo314/appendable.

Kevin and Matthew

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