Attic Labs is an startup based in San Francisco. The company has announced they’ve raised $8.1 Million to advance Noms: their own open source database software. Noms differs from other database software by making it possible to fork and sync data in the same way that git allows people to work together on source code. Noms is licensed under the Apache license and is available on GitHub.
According to the Github page, Noms is different than other database platforms because it is:
- Content-addressed. If you have some data you want to put into Noms, you don’t have to worry about whether it already exists. Duplicate data is automatically ignored. There is no update, only insert.
- Append-only. When you commit data to Noms, you aren’t overwriting anything. Instead you’re adding to a historical record. By default, data is never removed from Noms. You can see the entire history of the database, diff any two commits, or rewind to any previous point in time.
- Strongly-typed. Noms doesn’t have schemas that you design up front. Instead, each version of a Noms database has atype, which is generated automatically as you add data. You can write code against the type of a Noms database, confident that you’ve handled all the cases you need to.
- Decentralized. If I give you a copy of my database, you and I can modify our copies disconnected from each other, and come back together and merge our changes efficiently and correctly days, weeks, or years later.
