NFDB is a vertical scaling solution
nostr is about horizontal scaling
missing the point that the relay itself is a shard in the data store is a fatal mistake
Discussion
NFDB is a horizontal scaling solution, though
it can scale to hundreds of hosts, sharing the same relay DB, without any issue at the base configuration, with tens of TB and an insane amount of clients
that can be extended to do cross-cluster sharding to achieve significantly more throughput as well
this is all within the constraints of full NIP-01 compliance still, and with strong consistency across every host
if you are able to forego some of that, and/or can give up some amount of consistency, you can go way higher…
I see a place for both, as relays are hubs and there can be different sized hubs, or one hub could be a set of relays.
exactly, the only real question is how to divvy up the data you push to the relays
it's a sharding problem, really, we don't have an easy solution for that but making all records into events is part of teh solution
i was already building a relay as a "cache server" a year ago
What Nostr solved for is for the need for every hub to be the same size and contain the same information. Nostr is useful, even if you only store your own notes in it.
That makes it extremely useful for storage that can be very tiny or very large, like git or a UNIX file server.
yep, you can make it more capable by concurrency and faster hardware, but it doesn't change the fact you have atomized the database by making it smart enough to do subscriptions and storage