Building a P2P Multi-Purpose Database

Barrel (https://barrel-db.org) is a modern multi-purpose database in Erlang focusing on data locality (put/match the data next to you) and P2P. Building a database in Erlang is indeed challenging. I/Os are handled differently from the other VM for example. Performance is always a trade-off versus the concurrency and the fault tolerance. On the other hand, Erlang, its vm, the OTP framework offer many competitive advantages that can help you to build a very effective database. To achieve this we created a binding of Facebook rocksdb based on dirty-nif, cowdb to have a pure erlang key/value storage ithout the limit of DETS and our own way to manage presence and claim spaces to store our data over the web.

Talk objectives:

This talk will show how we built Barrel in Erlang, using C when we needed it, which pattern we choose to achieve the read/write concurrency and how we distribute the data. It will show you also how we built a P2P protocol allowing us to distribute our data without any bottleneck.

Slides
Video

Tutorial: Getting Local First with Barrel

In this tutorial we will explore:

• What is Barrel.

• How to handle your data in Barrel

• The synchronisation of your data between your applications in Elixir or Erlang without any locking and bottleneck.

• The addition of new feature to barrels inside your application

• Going further and replicate to any mobile devices

Summary:

In physics, the concept of locality is that, for an action at one point to have an influence at another point, something in the space between the points, such as a field, must mediate the action. This exactly what is trying Barrel, a modern multi-purpose database in Erlang focusing on data locality. With Barrel you're able to put and match the data next to you in a P2P manner without any single point of failure.

Audience:

Erlanger who wants to synchronize its data between multiple locations without conflicts in Erlang or Elixir.

Slides

About Benoit

Benoît Chesneau is a internet craftsman, living near Paris. He has years of experience in building small and big-scale database backend websites. He is the founder of a company building innovative web services and open-source applications. Benoît Chesneau is also the founder of the Barrel projects, the author of Gunicorn and multiple other opensource projects in Python and Erlang.

GitHub: benoitc

Twitter: @benoitc

Back to conference page