Development Diary #8

Well, it’s been a while since we wrote one of these! And 2023 has been an interesting year with lots of excitement at JUXT. We’ve also seen lots of good things happening in the wider XTDB world, so let’s dive in.

Working towards XTDB v2

In April Jon Pither (CEO) spoke at the Clojure Conj and confirmed what many had long since suspected, that we had started to ramp up development with an aim to ship the 'Core2' "research project" as the basis for XTDB v2 - our first major version release since 2019.

The 2.x branch in the GitHub repository reflects the latest state of v2. It’s not ready for production quite yet, but the team is clear about the scope of work to make v2 production ready and is now committed to the technical roadmap required for a General Availability release in 2024.

For the moment we want to invite anyone who is interested in giving us early feedback on the v2 design and APIs to do so by following the story here. As we look to a more formal release process, starting with alpha1 in early 2024, we will be working closely with keen early users to validate all future changes, so please do get involved now if you think v2 looks like a database you would like to use in production some day!

We are running a webinar on 19 December where all this and more will be covered in detail.

Currently the only SDK we have ready for kicking the tyres is Clojure, but we have complete end-to-end JSON API support landing soon. We also have some news on the query language front: we have been building something called "XTQL" which interoperates seamlessly with SQL and will work across Java/Python/Rust/etc. (in due course) - check out the v2 hub page for more on that.

Other things that have happened

In May JUXT celebrated a 10-year anniversary and threw a party in London with a variety of tech talks, including "UPDATE Considered Harmful" which covers the context for why most modern database systems aren’t already immutable/bitemporal:

In August there was a webinar on the history and state of bitemporality in the software industry - see the on-demand recording below and also the Q&A.

We also spoke to industry pioneer Kent Beck about bitemporality (and many other topics) and interviewed him on the JUXT Cast.

v1 updates

The mainline 1.x production releases of XTDB have continued and 2023 has seen 7 incremental releases and a lot of bugs firmly squashed - check them out!

Thanks, as ever, to everyone who helps us with bug hunting and validating the fixes.

Community

Here are some cool things users have been sharing recently:

an interesting write-up from Biff on how XTDB is used and compares to other databases
xtbb - "A simple XTDB querying CLI using Babashka"
xtdb-py - "A Python ORM for XTDB"
Brimm announcement post - "Notion-inspired versatile knowledge management backed by a graph you own, full stack and open source. Coming Q1 2024."
(did we miss something? do say!)

That’s it for the moment (and this is far from an exhaustive review of 2023) but we have a lot more to announce soon, so stay tuned.

As always, do get in touch with the team if you have any questions, issues, or feedback.