fdb.dev

fdb-go — FoundationDB for Go

Go port of Apple's FoundationDB Record Layer. Wire-compatible with Java Record Layer 4.12.11.0 — Go and Java applications can read and write the same data on a shared FDB cluster.

Status

Pre-1.0. Not yet declared production-ready — pin a commit and run the suites below before relying on it. Maturity varies by layer:

Before production use: pin a commit, run the conformance + differential + stress suites against your workload, and review PRODUCTION_READINESS.md / TODO-production.md for the current gap list. Report issues per SECURITY.md. For running it — connecting, transactions, online index builds, schema evolution, backup, and observability — see the operator guide.

Target versions

FDB 8.0 is not yet released. When it ships, the Go bindings and client library should be upgraded together.

Why

The Record Layer gives you structured records, secondary indexes, and transactional schema evolution on top of FoundationDB's ordered key-value store. This port brings that to Go without sacrificing interoperability with existing Java deployments.

Performance

Includes a pure Go FDB client that speaks the FDB wire protocol directly — no CGo, no C library dependency.

Both clients run in the same process against the same FDB testcontainer, same keys. TestBenchmarkSanity verifies byte-identical results.

With simulated network latency (tc netem):

Reads 2-4x faster on localhost, still 2.4x at 10 ms RTT, converges to parity at extreme latency. Writes at parity. See PERFORMANCE.md for the analysis.

Usage

db.Run(ctx, func(rtx *recordlayer.FDBRecordContext) (any, error) {
    store, err := recordlayer.NewStoreBuilder().
        SetMetaDataProvider(metadata).
        SetContext(rtx).
        SetSubspace(keyspace).
        CreateOrOpen()
    if err != nil {
        return nil, err
    }

    return store.SaveRecord(order)
})

Type-safe access via generics:

typed := recordlayer.NewTypedFDBRecordStore[*pb.Order](store)
order, err := typed.LoadRecord(ctx, primaryKey)

FDB client

Use the pure-Go client directly through pkg/fdbgo/fdb. It mirrors Apple's Go binding (apple/foundationdb/bindings/go), so existing FoundationDB code ports with minimal changes:

import "fdb.dev/pkg/fdbgo/fdb"

fdb.MustAPIVersion(730)
db, _ := fdb.OpenDatabase(clusterFile)
db.Transact(func(tx fdb.WritableTransaction) (any, error) {
	tx.Set(fdb.Key("k"), []byte("v"))
	return tx.Get(fdb.Key("k")).MustGet(), nil
})

A default go build links no cgo and no C library. The Record Layer and SQL engine can optionally run on Apple's libfdb_c instead, selected by a build tag. The choice is static per binary, since libfdb_c's network thread is initialized once per process:

go build ./...                        # default: the pure-Go client (no cgo, no libfdb_c)
CGO_ENABLED=1 go build -tags libfdbc  # the Record Layer on Apple's libfdb_c (the escape hatch)

Both clients read and write byte-identical records, index entries, and continuations against the same cluster, proven by a cross-backend differential suite, so flipping the tag keeps data shared (with each other, and with Java/C apps). This is the idiom the standard library uses for its netgo/netcgo split and sqlite uses to swap mattn/go-sqlite3 (cgo) for modernc.org/sqlite (pure-Go). The build-tag backend selection is internal to the layers (pkg/internal/fdbclient); code that uses the fdb client directly always gets the pure-Go client.

SQL engine

Built-in SQL engine via Go's database/sql interface. Queries are optimized by a Cascades-based query planner ported from Java's fdb-relational-core.

import _ "fdb.dev/pkg/relational/sqldriver"

db, _ := sql.Open("fdbsql", "fdbsql:///mydb?cluster_file=/etc/foundationdb/fdb.cluster&schema=main")

// DDL
db.Exec("CREATE DATABASE /mydb")
db.Exec(`CREATE SCHEMA TEMPLATE app_tmpl
    CREATE TABLE Users (id BIGINT NOT NULL, name STRING, email STRING, PRIMARY KEY (id))
    CREATE INDEX idx_email ON Users (email)`)
db.Exec("CREATE SCHEMA /mydb/main WITH TEMPLATE app_tmpl")

// DML
db.Exec("INSERT INTO Users (id, name, email) VALUES (1, 'Alice', 'alice@example.com')")
db.Exec("UPDATE Users SET name = 'Bob' WHERE id = 1")

// Queries — Cascades optimizer picks index scans, sort elimination, streaming aggregation
rows, _ := db.Query("SELECT name FROM Users WHERE email = 'alice@example.com'")
rows, _ = db.Query("SELECT name FROM Users ORDER BY id DESC")  // reverse PK scan
rows, _ = db.Query("SELECT email, COUNT(*) FROM Users GROUP BY email ORDER BY email ASC")

Supported SQL (the authoritative, tested surface is the yamsql scenarios under pkg/relational/conformance/yamsql/testdata/ + DIVERGENCES.md at HEAD; the list below is a hand summary of those, not a separately-maintained source of truth). For an exhaustive, auto-generated inventory of every scenario by feature area, see FEATURE_MATRIX.md (regenerated by just feature-matrix):

• SELECT with WHERE, ORDER BY (ASC/DESC, including mixed directions), DISTINCT, GROUP BY, HAVING, LIMIT / OFFSET
• Aggregates: COUNT, SUM, MIN, MAX, AVG
• JOINs: INNER, comma-join / self-join, and LEFT / RIGHT / FULL OUTER JOIN (outer joins are a Go-only read-side extension — Java's SQL layer has none; wire compat is unaffected)
• Subqueries in WHERE: EXISTS / NOT EXISTS, IN (SELECT ...), and correlated scalar subqueries (Go-only read-side extensions)
• CTEs: WITH ... AS (SELECT ...), including chained CTEs
• UNION ALL
• INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE
• CASE, COALESCE, CAST, arithmetic, scalar functions (e.g. UPPER, LOWER)
• Computed projections with aliases

ORDER BY works without an index via a Go-only bounded in-memory sort (RecordQueryInMemorySortPlan, beyond Java's index-only Cascades); a supporting index/PK avoids the sort, and an unbounded ORDER BY without LIMIT is capped to avoid OOM. Self-joins and CTE+JOINs correctly resolve alias-qualified columns.

Not yet supported in the SQL engine:

• A plain CTE referenced inside a UNION branch (recursive CTEs, which use UNION internally, do work)
• IN (SELECT ...) in DML WHERE (rejected; rewrite as a correlated EXISTS)
• General window functions (matching Java — only ROW_NUMBER() ... QUALIFY for vector K-NN search exists; see TODO.md)
• Synthetic record types (JoinedRecordType, UnnestedRecordType)

What works

Records, indexes, cursors, and all the plumbing needed to share data with Java:

• CRUD — save, load, delete, scan, existence checks, typed stores
• Indexes — VALUE, VERSION, RANK, COUNT, SUM, MIN_EVER, MAX_EVER, MAX_EVER_VERSION, COUNT_NOT_NULL, COUNT_UPDATES, PERMUTED_MIN, PERMUTED_MAX, TEXT, BITMAP_VALUE, MULTIDIMENSIONAL, TIME_WINDOW_LEADERBOARD, VECTOR (HNSW)
• Covering indexes — KeyWithValueExpression (value columns stored in FDB value)
• Index operations — scan (BY_VALUE, BY_RANK, BY_GROUP), rebuild, online build (BY_RECORDS), state management (READABLE/WRITE_ONLY/DISABLED/READABLE_UNIQUE_PENDING)
• Split records — automatic chunking at 100KB, transparent reassembly
• Record versioning — 12-byte versions (10 global versionstamp + 2 local)
• Cursors — concat, map, filter, skip, limit, union, intersection, dedup, flatmap, chained, auto-continuing, fallback
• Continuations — cross-platform cursor resume tokens (record and index level)
• Scan limits — time, byte, and record scan limits
• Transactions — configurable retry with exponential backoff, commit hooks, conflict reporting
• Schema evolution — MetaDataValidator, MetaDataEvolutionValidator
• Bulk operations — DeleteAllRecords, DeleteRecordsWhere, record counting (atomic)
• Aggregate functions — EvaluateAggregateFunction (COUNT, SUM, MIN, MAX, RANK functions)
• Store management — format version 14, store locking (FORBID_RECORD_UPDATE, FULL_STORE), incarnation, header user fields
• Key expressions — Field, RecordType, Empty, Composite (Then), Nesting, FanOut, Grouping, FunctionKey, KeyWithValue, Version
• Instrumentation — StoreTimer with timed events and counters matching Java's FDBStoreTimer
• Store state caching — FDBRecordStoreStateCache interface with PassThroughStoreStateCache default

What doesn't (yet)

• Synthetic record types (JoinedRecordType, UnnestedRecordType)

Full gap analysis in TODO.md.

Conformance

Wire compatibility is verified by a conformance suite that runs both Go and Java (Record Layer 4.12.11.0) against the same FDB instance, cross-validating reads and writes bidirectionally.

Wire format

All 10 keyspace constants match the Java implementation:

Tuple encoding, split record layout, continuation token format, and index entry structure are all verified against Java.

Test coverage

434 conformance specs (Go↔Java cross-validation), 5320 Go test functions, and 2702 Ginkgo specs against real FDB via testcontainers. 8000+ total test entry points. 1579-entry SQL corpus runs through the Go engine with zero failures.

Getting started

# 1. Start FoundationDB (Docker)
docker run -d --name fdb -p 4500:4500 foundationdb/foundationdb:7.3.77

# 2. Get the cluster file
docker exec fdb cat /var/fdb/fdb.cluster > /tmp/fdb.cluster

# 3. Use from Go
go get fdb.dev/pkg/relational/sqldriver

package main

import (
    "database/sql"
    "fmt"
    _ "fdb.dev/pkg/relational/sqldriver"
)

func main() {
    db, _ := sql.Open("fdbsql", "fdbsql:///myapp?cluster_file=/tmp/fdb.cluster&schema=main")
    db.Exec("CREATE DATABASE /myapp")
    db.Exec(`CREATE SCHEMA TEMPLATE app CREATE TABLE Users (id BIGINT NOT NULL, name STRING, PRIMARY KEY (id))`)
    db.Exec("CREATE SCHEMA /myapp/main WITH TEMPLATE app")

    db.Exec("INSERT INTO Users VALUES (1, 'Alice'), (2, 'Bob')")

    rows, _ := db.Query("SELECT id, name FROM Users ORDER BY id")
    for rows.Next() {
        var id int64; var name string
        rows.Scan(&id, &name)
        fmt.Printf("%d: %s\n", id, name)
    }
}

Runnable, CI-compiled examples live under example/:

• example/sql — the SQL path above, fleshed out (DDL, parameterized INSERT, point query, GROUP BY aggregate over an index). go run ./example/sql.
• example/getting_started.go — the lower-level record-store API (metadata, typed SaveRecord/loadRecord, index scans).

Building

Requires Bazel 9+ (via bazelisk) and Docker (for testcontainers).

just build      # compile + nogo lint (20 analyzers)
just test       # full test suite against real FDB
just gazelle    # regenerate BUILD files
just generate   # buf proto codegen

Project layout

pkg/recordlayer/        Record Layer implementation (CRUD, indexes, cursors, schema)
pkg/relational/         SQL engine (parser, Cascades optimizer, executor, database/sql driver)
pkg/fdbgo/              Pure Go FDB client (wire protocol, no CGo)
gen/                    Generated protobuf Go code
proto/apple/            Apple's original proto definitions
conformance/            Go↔Java cross-validation tests + Java conformance server

Running specific tests

bazelisk test //pkg/recordlayer:recordlayer_test \
    --test_arg="--ginkgo.focus=CountIndex" --test_output=streamed

License

See LICENSE.