Can anyone explain what's so special about FoundationDB? Why Apple would want to acquire it? Why exactly FDB and not some other *DB, which we have tons now after last… I don't know… seven years? Just why? I don't get it.
FoundationDB was a performant, distributed (multiple machines), shared nothing (multi-master) key-value database with SQL on top (not sure if it was standards compliant SQL) that supported translations and serializable isolation (ACID complaint IIRC, but they were some size limitations).
In any case, given that narrow feature set, I can't think of many production quality NoSQL databases with that feature set, and I can't think of any that replicated the millions of writes/sec on GCE like Foundation did, so Foundation seems to be quite special.
Interestingly enough Apple is a heavy user of Cassandra, so if this related to iCloud I wonder if they decided to replace it and why. Or maybe they had enough money where the decided they could just own the database, and DataStax's valuation was too high.
