Following an 8-month beta program with more than 700 registered participants, Fluree PBC has announced the GA release of FlureeDB, a blockchain database built for enterprise-grade applications.
“FlureeDB is a product we have been building for 4 years now,” said Brian Platz, co-founder and co-CEO at Fluree PBC. “It is a very innovative database in that it incorporates a lot of the features that people want and need today as they are developing apps but also incorporates blockchain capabilities in the core of how it operates.”
FlureeDB can run internally as a graph database to power standard business applications and can also be distributed and decentralized—in its entirety—across an established network of participants known as a “permissioned blockchain.” Permissioned blockchains provide entities in a consortium with a transparent ledger of transactions that is immutable by nature and decentralized with no central authority which can be useful for industries such as supply chain management, insurance, real estate, and fintech.
Blockchain distributed ledger technology enables “extreme tamper resistance” so organizations can immediately detect if data has been altered, and offers a complete, provable audit trail for everything that has happened and the ability for it to run decentralized if organizations choose, said Platz. Running decentralized allows multiple companies to share a common database where no single company controls it or can manipulate it.
This is important anywhere multiple companies are sharing data—“which happens everywhere, all the time,” said Platz. In these scenarios, they can run the database together without having to have one person run it or needing an auditing capability, he noted.
Describing FlureeDB’s value proposition, Platz said that most of the blockchains in the market today are purpose-oriented, where developers have written code to enable it to do one specific thing and because of this, the ability to evolve the requirements over time becomes “extraordinarily difficult.” In contrast, said Platz, FlureeDB is actually a toolkit that allows you to build your own custom blockchains without having to fork and develop code. “You just configure it like you would set up a database.”
In addition, the database offers capabilities that developers will want to use even if they don’t care about the blockchain aspect.
Beyond providing an immutable blockchain core for tamper resistance and a provable historic audit trail, FlureeDB provides “smart” database functions for programmatic control over data updates, consensus rules, or permissions; a “Time Travel” point in time query feature that allows every version of a historical database to be queried instantly; and a graph database format with analytical query logic support. There is also a separate query engine for linear scaling, delivering sub-millisecond query responses; a cloud-hosted (DBaaS) option for no management overhead; and support for ACID-compliant transactions.
According to Fluree, number of companies involved with its beta program are already poised to launch production-ready applications built on FlureeDB, including Alpha Software, a low-code enterprise application development platform; Benekiva, a life insurance claims processing platform; SSBI, a major India consulting company that has built a government records management solution; One Donation, a charitable giving SaaS offering; and [Docsmore, a document management platform.
The database is now available for download or as a hosted service at www.flur.ee. It is free for lightweight applications to try, or is available as a paid enterprise version, which includes additional features and priority support.