Building The Database That Can Do It All | Tobie Morgan Hitchcock, CEO of SurrealDB
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Hi, I'm Matt Turk. Welcome to the MAD Podcast. Today, our guest is Toby Morgan Hitchcock, the CEO of SerialDB, a rising star redefining what a modern database can be at a time when the world of data infrastructure is as diverse and complex as ever. For the last decade or two, we've seen a proliferation of specialized databases, document, graph, time series, you name it. But SerialDB is different. It's aiming to be the one database to rule them all, a universal solution that brings the best of these specialized worlds into a single coherent platform. We talked
about the origin story of SurrealDB. We were managing four different databases, ensuring that they're up, working as you want them to be, updated in the right ways, and that becomes time consuming, complex. We wanted to move away from that. And we wanted something simpler. That was how SurrealDB came about. Their 2.0 release that just came out. We will be the first database that enables you to time travel in your data where they fit in the rising AI infrastructure. One of the pieces of functionality we have in Cerule B is the ability to bring a model right inside the database.
And what it's like to work with your brother as co-founder.
My brother is the marketing, the branding, the design, everything behind Cerule B, but not the code. For anybody who has my brother, we are very different. Please enjoy my chat with Toby. Welcome, Toby. Thanks for having me here.
So this is actually one of the very first, if not the first podcast that you do. Is that correct?
This is the very first podcast I've ever been on. Done lots of streams, done video interviews, TV interviews, but never a podcast.
Okay. All right. This is a world premiere. Very excited for it, which is interesting because SurrealDB sort of popped seemingly out of nowhere a couple of years ago and got very noticeable and noticed success as an open source project. We caught people's imagination. But while you have a great community and web presence, you haven't done too many of the things. So thank you for being here today. We appreciate it. So maybe as a quick intro, what is the sort of 30-second elevator pitch for SurrealDB?
So SurrealDB is reimagining databases. So effectively the tool that people use to store data and then, once they've stored it, to query that data. The thing about SerialDB is it makes it much simpler in terms of querying that data, and it means that you can reduce the number of databases that you have to work with as a developer, as an engineer, or as an organization by consolidating different database types together into one single platform that reduces cost, reduces development time, reduces the management of that application or that system as you go forward. So there's lots more to it, but in a nutshell, it's about simplification of the data backend.
Okay, great. All right. So we're going to go into all of this, but maybe start with the story behind the company. I mentioned a minute ago that you guys sort of shot up seemingly out of nowhere in, I think, the fall of 2022 with a lot of open source success, but is it fair to say it was one of those overnight success stories many years in the making?
I'd love to say I wrote 300,000 lines on a weekend of code, but no, it didn't happen on that, unfortunately. If you look at many databases out there, they're improving slightly on one particular thing. They may be improving on performance or improving on what you can do with your data or how it runs in the cloud or something like that. But with SerialDB, we had to reimagine a lot of the many different parts of the database in order to make what SerialDB is today. I guess where we start is why I decided to build Cerulean in the first place as opposed to how we started building it. So we were running traditional cloud applications, on top of many different databases in a similar way to how other organizations are doing it today still.
So a time series database, a document database, a graph database if you're doing analysis over related or connected data.
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Chapters
5 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–9:43
2
What is SurrealDB and how does it differ from traditional databases?
9:43–14:57
3
How did SurrealDB get started and what problem was it built to solve?
14:57–25:37
4
What were the biggest technical challenges of building a database from scratch?
25:37–33:35
5
Why did the team choose Rust for the complete rewrite of SurrealDB?
33:35–53:04
Speakers
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