FaunaDB shuts down but hints at open source future

Capital costs of creating document-relational serverless database take their toll

FaunaDB - the database that promised relational power with document flexibility - will shut down its service at the end of May. The biz says it plans to release an open-source version of its core tech.

The startup pocketed $27 million in VC funding in 2020 and boasted that 25,000 developers worldwide were using its serverless database.

However, last week, FaunaDB announced that it would sunset its database services.

"Driving broad based adoption of a new operational database that runs as a service globally is very capital intensive. In the current market environment, our board and investors have determined that it is not possible to raise the capital needed to achieve that goal independently," the leadership team said.

"While we will no longer be accepting new customers, existing Fauna customers will experience no immediate change. We will gradually transition customers off Fauna and are committed to ensuring a smooth process over the next several months," it added.

FaunaDB said it plans to release an open-source version of its core database technology. The system stores data in JSON documents but retains relational features like consistency, support for joins and foreign keys, and full schema enforcement. Fauna's query language, FQL, will also be made available to the open-source community.

Former technical lead at Twitter's database team, Matt Freels, co-founded FaunaDB along with fellow Twitter veteran Evan Weaver, who left in 2023.

The database biz counted development teams at Tyson Foods, Unilever, Lexmark, and software company Anaplan among its customers.

One commentator pointed out that FaunaDB might have been more successful in gaining market traction if it had employed the open-source model from the beginning.

"While there is no alternative history, I wonder what would have happened if Fauna had chosen to start as Open Source, become 100x more widely adopted but monetize a smaller portion of their customers due to 'competing' open source alternative," posited Peter Zaitsev, an early MySQL engineer and founder of database consultancy Percona. ®