Fauna, the distributed document-relational database delivered as a cloud API, is debuting new schema features and types, empowering organizations to easily evolve their database schema as the needs of their business and applications change. These features build upon Fauna’s mission to deliver capabilities traditionally associated with a relational database to the document model, as well as innovating to meet the demands of modern applications, according to the company.
This release introduces Fauna’s new declarative schema language, Fauna Schema Language (FSL), which enables developers to define their domain models, access controls, and business logic in human-readable language. With FSL, developers can treat their database schema like they treat their application code, as well as use popular Infrastructure as Code tools—such as Pulumi and Terraform—to automate Fauna database configuration deployment and management.
FSL serves to match the pace of database development with that of application development, delivering database schema-level changes to CI/CD workflows, according to Fauna.
Fauna’s latest release highlights new Document Types, complementing Fauna’s Computed Fields—a feature that allows the values of fields in documents to be dynamically generated based on user-defined expressions—and Check Constraints in the ability to apply schema enforcement over time. Document Types empower developers to define and enforce schema structures directly within the database, merging the powers of flexible document models with strict data integrity controls.
Additionally, Fauna is debuting Zero-Downtime Migrations, a function that enables teams to execute schema changes without disrupting crucial service processes—a prevalent challenge for database management. By preventing application outages during schema changes, enterprises can adopt continuous deployment and integration practices through predictable, manageable, non-disruptive migrations.
“Document databases have proven the many benefits of a developer friendly and flexible document model but are missing many of the key functionality native to relational databases, including powerful relational query capabilities, ACID compliance, and schema enforcement” said Hassen Karaa, VP of product at 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 overtime as needed.”
To learn more about Fauna’s latest release, please visit https://fauna.com/.