Fauna Schema Language, types and enforcement, and support for zero downtime migrations empower engineering teams to iterate quickly and scale with confidence
Fauna, the distributed document-relational database delivered as a cloud API, announced the public availability of their new schema capability. With Fauna’s Schema Language, types and enforcement, and support for zero downtime schema migrations; developers can define and manage, progressively type and enforce, and seamlessly evolve their database schema in response to the changing needs of the business.
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These new features are another example of how Fauna continues to add capabilities traditionally associated with a relational database, while innovating to meet the needs of today’s modern applications and agile software development practices.
“Document databases have proven the many benefits of a developer friendly and flexible document model, but are missing many of the key capabilities native to relational databases, including powerful relational query capabilities, ACID compliance, and schema enforcement,” said Hassen Karaa, VP Product of Fauna. “With the addition of our new Schema capabilities, development teams can move faster with confidence by defining and managing their schema alongside application code, and progressively enforce schema structure over time as needed.”
Define and Manage Schema Alongside Application Code
With Fauna’s new declarative schema language, Fauna Schema Language (FSL), developers can define their domain models, access controls, and business logic in human-readable language, contained in a set of files that can be managed alongside their related application code. FSL enables developers to treat their database schema just like they do their application code. Leveraging GitHub they can now automate testing that is triggered by pushing a new schema version alongside their application code to ensure the integrity of the database. Similarly development teams can leverage popular Infrastructure as Code tools like Pulumi and Terraform to automate the deployment and management of their Fauna database configuration.
Combined, these features enable database development to match the pace of application development by incorporating database schema-level changes into broader CI/CD workflows – a crucial advancement for enterprise engineering teams tasked with building, scaling, and improving applications at every stage of development.
Progressively Type and Enforce Schema
Fauna’s new Document Types allows developers to define and enforce schema structures directly within the database, blending the flexibility of document models with the strict data integrity controls of relational databases. Document Types support both static and dynamic typing, enabling developers to start with a schemaless approach and introduce stricter type controls as application requirements evolve.
Computed Fields allow the values of fields in documents to be dynamically generated based on expressions defined by the user. This means developers can create fields whose values are calculated at the time of query, enabling dynamic composition of objects and field values. These fields can be indexed, providing even greater flexibility in query patterns so developers can accurately define their true data model in the database unlike other databases which require them to be defined in mapping layers running outside of the database.
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Encoding database logic within the database allows development teams to define cross-collection joins and subqueries as an element of their schema design, so they can dynamically generate data, and object models in real-time to avoid the performance disadvantages inherent in a denormalization strategy required in other document databases.
Document Types complement Fauna’s Computed Fields and Check Constraints, creating schema enforcement that can be progressively applied over time. Together these features provide the structure and reliability of traditional relational databases with the flexibility of a modern document model.
“Fauna’s new schema capabilities unlock powerful optionality for evolving and enforcing our database schema over time,” shared Cameron Bell, Head of Software, Systems, and Data at Connexin. “The new features will enable us to dial-in and dial-out schema as our applications evolve and adapt to changing business requirements without compromising data integrity or business operations.”
Evolve Schema with Zero Downtime Migrations
The introduction of Zero-Downtime Migrations empowers teams to implement schema changes without service interruptions, facilitating continuous deployment and integration practices.This feature addresses a common challenge in database management – preventing application outages during schema changes. Driven via Fauna’s Schema Language (FSL), these migrations can be scripted and versioned as code, allowing developers to align database schema changes directly with their application’s CI/CD pipelines. This capability is crucial for applications requiring high availability and ensures that migrations are both predictable and manageable within existing development workflows.
“While infrastructure as code has revolutionized application delivery in recent years, database management has lagged behind, making it harder for organizations to build and change apps safely and quickly,” said James Governor, co-founder of RedMonk, the developer-focused industry analyst firm. “By building schema as code into its document relational platform Fauna is bringing modern software development practices to database evolution, enabling progressive delivery for schema changes.”
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