Michael Stonebraker has developed several influential database management systems over the years, including Ingres, PostgreSQL, and VoltDB. Matei Zaharia is the creator of Apache Spark and co-founder and CTO of Databricks.
Working with a team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Stanford University, the pair have created a revolutionary operating system prototype called DBOS – DataBase OS.
The concept of DBOS was born three years ago when Stonebraker realized that the state that an operating system must maintain (files, processes, threads, messages, etc.) has grown exponentially since the early days of Unix. This, along with the limitations of Linux in the current technology landscape, sparked the idea of running the operating system on a database.
DBOS Cloud
“When I heard a talk by Matei Zaharia in which he said that Databricks couldn't use traditional operating system programming technology at the scale they were running and had instead turned to a DBMS solution, it became clear that it was time to move the DBMS to the kernel. and create a new operating system,” says Stonebraker.
As The next platform As he says: “Ultimately, every problem in the ever-evolving IT software stack becomes a database problem, which is why there are 418 different databases and data warehouses in DB Engines rankings.” and there are really only a handful of commercially viable operating systems. But what if he OS is the problem?”
DBOS operates by encoding operating system services in SQL in a high-performance, distributed, transactional, and fault-tolerant database management system (DBMS). As Stonebraker says, “This contrasts with the traditional method of running the DBMS in user space on an operating system without DBMS services.”
Created as a joint open source R&D project of MIT and Stanford, the DBOS prototype demonstrated performance comparable to Linux, but with the addition of several notable features, including high availability, time travel, transactionality, tolerance to failures, integrated multi-node scaling, SQL-accessible system state and observability data, and cyber resilience.
Following the successful prototyping of DBOS and obtaining funding, DBOS, Inc. was launched in April 2023, and the company has now launched DBOS Cloud, a serverless transactional platform built on DBOS, designed for stateful TypeScript applications. DBOS Cloud offers key DBOS features such as reliable execution and time travel.
Trusted execution means that if a DBOS program is interrupted, it will automatically resume from where it left off, ensuring that no work is repeated and that programs always run to completion. Time travel allows users to restore an application's state to any point in the past, allowing rare bugs to be reproduced and new code to run in a historical state.
DBOS Cloud is now available for anyone to try for free.
