Databases

In Fauna, a database stores data as documents in one or more collections.

Database structure

Fauna supports a hierarchical database structure, allowing for top-level and child databases.

Top-level databases

Top-level databases exist in an account’s top-level context. Aside from top-level keys, all other Fauna resources, including child databases, exist as documents within the context of a specific database.

Child databases

A Fauna database can have multiple child databases. Child databases can have child databases.

Provisioning

All databases, including child databases, are instantly allocated. There is no resource provisioning or warmup wait interval.

Multi-tenancy

You can use child databases to build multi-tenant applications with strong isolation guarantees.

Child databases do not inherit schema or access controls from their parent database. Each database is logically isolated from its peers, with separate access controls.

When connected to a child database, it isn’t possible to access the parent database or even discover that there is a parent database.

If your use case doesn’t require strong isolation, you can also use collections for multi-tenancy. See Exploring Multi-Tenancy Options in Fauna.

Transaction scope and routing

In Fauna, every transaction is an HTTP API request. Fauna uses authentication secrets to route requests to a single database or an account’s top-level context.

Transactions run in the context of a single database and can’t access data outside the database.

Database system collection

Fauna stores metadata and settings for databases as documents in the Database system collection. You can use Database collection methods to create and manage databases in FQL.

The Database collection only contains direct child databases of the database scoped to your authentication secret. You can’t use the Database collection to access parent, peer, or other descendant databases.

If you use an authentication secret scoped to an account’s top-level context, the Database collection contains documents for the account’s top-level databases. You can create a top-level secret using the fauna cloud-login command.

See Role FQL docs

Global database ID

Each Database document contains an auto-generated, globally unique ID for the database:

{
  name: "ECommerce",
  coll: Database,
  ts: Time("2099-06-24T21:54:38.890Z"),
  // Globally unique id for the `ECommerce` database.
  global_id: "ysjpykbahyyr1",
  priority: 10,
  typechecked: true
}

Applications and external systems can use this ID to identify a Fauna database.

Create and manage databases

You can create and manage databases using:

Create and manage top-level databases

To create or manage a top-level database using the Fauna CLI or an FQL query, you must use an authentication secret scoped to the account’s top-level context. You can create a top-level secret using the fauna cloud-login command.

Create and manage child databases

To create or manage a child database using the Fauna CLI or an FQL query, you must use an authentication secret scoped to the parent database.

Rename a database

You can rename a database using the Fauna Dashboard. You can also use update() to rename a database in an FQL query:

// Renames the `ECommerce` database to `EcommerceStore`.
Database.byName("ECommerce")!.update({
  name: "ECommerceStore"
})

Renaming a database changes its reference but preserves inbound references to the database. Data in a renamed database remains accessible using existing keys.

Delete a database

You can delete a database using the Fauna Dashboard or the Fauna CLI's delete-database command:

fauna delete-database ECommerce

You can also use delete() to delete child databases in an FQL query:

// Renames the `ECommerce` database to `EcommerceStore`.
Database.byName("ECommerce")!.delete()

Considerations

When you delete a database, its data becomes inaccessible and is asynchronously deleted. As part of the deletion process, Fauna recursively deletes:

  • Any keys scoped to the database.

  • The database’s child databases, including any nested databases.

Deleting a database with a large number of keys can exceed Transactional Write Ops throughput limits and cause errors with a 429 HTTP status code.

Deleting a database with a large number of child databases can cause errors with a 440 HTTP status code.

To avoid throttling or timeouts, incrementally delete all keys and child databases before deleting the database. See delete all keys and delete all child databases.

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