A couple of months ago I had the joy of giving an internal lecture to our developer group about Voron, RavenDB’s dedicated storage engine. In the lecture, I’m going over the design and implementation of our storage engine.

If you ever had an interest on how RavenDB’s transactional and high performance storage works, that is the lecture for you. Note that this is aimed at our developers, so we are going deep.

You can find the slides here and here is the full video.

One of the most fun things that I do at work is share knowledge about how various things work. A few months ago I talked internally about how Certificates work. Instead of just describing the mechanism of that, I decided to actually walk our developers through the process of building the certificate infrastructure from scratch.

You can find the slides here and the full video is available online, it’s just over an hour of both lecture and discussion.

I’m trying to pay a SaaS bill online, and I run into the following issue. I have insufficient permissions to pay the invoice on the account. No insufficient funds, which is something that you’ll routinely run into when dealing with payment processing. But insufficient permissions!

Is… paying something an act that requires permissions? That something that happens? Can I get more vulnerabilities like that? When I get people to drive-by pay for my bills?

I can’t think of a scenario where you are prevented from paying to the provider. That is… weird.

And now I’m in this “nice” position where I have to chase after the provider to give them money, because otherwise they’ll close the account.

We got an interesting question in the RavenDB Discussion:

We have Polo (shirts) products. Some customers search for Polo and others search for Polos. The term Polos exists in only a few of the descriptions and marketing info so the results are different.

Is there a way to automatically generate singular and plural forms of a term or would I have to explicitly add those?

What is actually requested here is to perform a process known as stemming. Turning a word into its root. That is a core concept in full-text search, and RavenDB allows you to make use of that.

The idea is that during indexing and queries, RavenDB will transform the search terms into a common stem and search on that. Let’s look at how this works, shall we?

The first step is to make an index named Products/Search with the following definition:

from p in docs.Products
select new { p.Name }

That is about as simple an index as you can get, but we still need to configure the indexing of the Name field on the index, like so:

You can see that I customized the Name field and marked it for full-text search using the SnowballAnalyzer, which is responsible for properly stemming the terms.

However, if you try to create this index, you’ll get an error. By default, RavenDB doesn’t include the SnowballAnalyzer, but that isn’t going to stop us. This is because RavenDB allows users to define custom analyzers.

In the database “Settings”, go to “Custom Analyzers”:

And there you can  add a new analyzer. You can find the code for the analyzer in question in this Gist link.

You can also register analyzers by compiling them and placing the resulting DLLs in the RavenDB binaries directory. I find that having it as a single source file that we push to RavenDB in this manner is far cleaner.

Registering the analyzer via source means that you don’t need to worry about versioning, deploying to all the nodes in the cluster, or any such issues. It’s the responsibility of RavenDB to take care of this.

I produced the analyzer file by simply concatenating the relevant classes into a single file, basically creating a consolidated version containing everything required. That is usually done for C or C++ projects, but it is very useful in this case as well. Note that the analyzer in question must have a parameterless constructor. In this case, I just selected an English stemmer as the default one.

With the analyzer properly registered, we can create the index and start querying on it.

As you can see, we are able to find both plural and singular forms of the term we are searching for.

To make things even more interesting, this functionality is available with both Lucene and Corax indexes, as Corax is capable of consuming Lucene Analyzers.

The idea behind full-text search in RavenDB is that you have a full-blown indexing engine at your fingertips, but none of the complexity involved. At the same time, you can utilize advanced features without needing to move to another solution, everything is in a single box.

In this episode we talk to Dejan Milicic about the new version of RavenDb that just dropped.

We also talk about how important passion is as a developer.

You can listen to this here.

RavenDB is typically accessed directly by your application, using an X509 certificate for authentication. The same applies when you are connecting to RavenDB as a user.

Many organizations require that user authentication will not use just a single factor (such as a password or a certificate) but multiple. RavenDB now supports the ability to define Two Factor Authentication for access.

Here is how this looks like in the RavenDB Studio:

You are able to generate a certificate as well as register the Authenticator code in your device.

When using the associated certificate, you’ll not be able to access RavenDB. Instead, you’ll get an error message saying that you need to complete the Two Factor Authentication process. Here is what that looks like:

Once you complete the two factor authentication process, you can select for how long we’ll allow access with the given certificate and whatever to allow just accesses from the current browser window (because you are accessing it directly) or from any client (you want to access RavenDB from another device or via code).

Once the session duration expires, you’ll need to provide the authentication code again, of course.

This feature is meant specifically for certificates that are used by people directly. It is not meant for APIs or programmatic access. Those should either have a manual step to allow the certificate or utilize a secrets manager that can have additional steps and validations based on your actual requirements.

You can read more about this feature in the feature announcement.

When Oren Eini originally developed RavenDB, he used the Lucene library to implement indexing. Eventually, his team encountered limitations with this strategy, so they created the Corax search engine, which improved query execution time significantly. Oren discusses the challenges involved in creating this engine and the approaches they took to overcome these challenges.

Part 1:

Part 2:

One of the interesting components of RavenDB Cloud is status reporting. It turns out that when you offer X as a Service, people really care about your operational status.

For RavenDB Cloud, we have https://status.ravendb.net/, which will give you some insights into the overall health of the system. Here are some details from the status page:

The interesting thing about this page is that it shows global status, indicating issues affecting large swaths of users. For instance, Azure having issues in a whole region in the image above is a great example of one such scenario. Regular maintenance, which we carry over the span of days, is something that we report, but you’ll usually never notice (due to the High Availability features of RavenDB).

It gets more complicated when we start talking about individual instances. There are many scenarios where the overall system health is great, but a particular database may suffer. The easiest example is if you run out of disk space. That affects that particular instance only.

For that scenario, we are reporting Production Monitoring Alerts within the RavenDB Cloud portal. Here is what this looks like:

As you can see, we report specific problems on those instances, raising that to your awareness. That was actually needed because, for the most part, RavenDB itself handles those sorts of things via High Availability, which means that even if there are issues, you’re likely to not feel them for a while.

Resilience at the cluster level means that even pretty severe problems are papered over and the system moves on. But there is only so much limping that you can do. If you are running at the bare edge of capacity, eventually you’ll trip over the line.

Those Production Monitoring Alerts allow you to detect and act upon those issues when they happen, not when they bring down production.

This aligns with our vision for RavenDB, the kind of system where you don’t need to have a full-time babysitter monitoring the system. Instead, if there is a problem that the database cannot solve on its own, it will explicitly notify you, in advance.

That leads to a system that is far healthier all around and means that you can focus on building your system, rather than managing database minutiae.