Fauna, the distributed document-relational database delivered as a cloud API, is announcing a variety of new capabilities to empower developer processes, including a new TypeScript-inspired database language, reimagined web and local development experiences, and a new declarative schema language. Aimed to invite more seamless, intuitive, and state-of-the-art functionality, these innovations serve to enhance the software development experience for those producing and scaling new and existing applications, according to the company.
When Fauna introduced its document-relational database, it was clear that a new programming language was required to fully utilize Fauna’s unique combination of a traditional relational database with a document data store.
This led to the birth of FQL—inspired by both Fauna customers and programming languages such as TypeScript and Python—which achieves simplicity, expressiveness, and developer productivity without sacrificing Fauna’s relational querying power. Armed with the ability to express declarative queries and functional business logic in consistent transactions, FQL is modular, composable, and familiar to developers.
“The goal [of FQL] was to enable developers to write clear and concise queries and transactional code for their operational data, enhancing the overall development experience and making it easier to work with Fauna's database capabilities,” explained Eric Berg, CEO of Fauna. “FQL is designed specifically to maximize Fauna’s unique architecture and document relational model…TypeScript or Python are among the most popular general-purpose programming languages, [however,] they both have capabilities that are not relevant/compatible with managing operational data and also lack the functionality necessary to create a database language that is fully functional.”
In addition to FQL, Fauna is unveiling its new integrated developer experience, which includes enhancements such as a new web shell, a command line interface and administrative dashboard, intelligent code completion, a VS Code plugin, and documentation site.
These enhancements emphasize effortlessness, offering developers ways to increase their productivity without increasing the complexity of their workflows. Context-switching is now eased with Fauna’s new web dashboard, while intelligent code completion enables developers to write queries faster.
“The new experience fosters a smooth and efficient workflow that caters to a developers’ preferences,” explained Berg. “Developers can effortlessly write queries using Fauna's web shell—a Web Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for their data. They can view inline query statistics and seamlessly change security context to test roles and permissions, while the shell provides guided ways to create documents and indexes or enables developers to work on multiple resources in separate tabs.”
“Whether you're a seasoned developer or embarking on your coding journey, Fauna's integrated developer experience boosts productivity and nurtures creativity,” he continued.
The introduction of Fauna’s new declarative schema language “enables Fauna to not only be used in adherence to the principles of DevOps, but also integrate with best-in-class IaC tooling and CI/CD pipelines,” according to Berg.
Developers are empowered to define Fauna database components in their natural language within a single file that is situated next to their application codebase, ultimately easing management and versioning overhead costs, according to the company.
This poses great advantages across the database lifecycle, facilitating DevOps automation for greater efficiency. Empowering integrations with popular IDEs, as well as providing code checking and error prevention early during development, saves developer time and headaches through consistent code.
All of these components—FQL, the new developer experience, and new declarative scheme language—combine to enable developers to create, maintain, and scale applications with confidence. Benefitting from Fauna’s existing advantages, including its multi-region architecture, strong consistency, low latency, and high availability, developers are empowered more than ever to deliver powerful, robust applications.
“We are making the operational database a first-class citizen in the modern software development process,” concluded Berg.
To learn more about Fauna’s latest capabilities, please visit https://fauna.com/.