FoundationDB, the company so far known mainly for its NoSQL data storage platform, expanded into the SQL world this week with the release of SQL Layer, a free and open source database engine that runs on top of the FoundationDB NoSQL platform.

SQL Layer is designed to offer the scalability, fault tolerance and high performance of FoundationDB's NoSQL key-value store, according to the company, while also delivering high concurrency and easy integration with the storage infrastructure that underlies websites and other applications. The product "can power many of the world's websites with little modification via compatibility with many popular Object Relational Mappers (ORMs) including ActiveRecord (Ruby/Rails), Django (Python), Hibernate (Java), SQLALchemy (Python), Doctrine (PHP) and EntityFramework (.NET)," FoundationDB said.

In geek-specific terms, key features of SQL Layer include hierarchical table modeling, parallel execution and nested select.

The company envisions the new offering as the first step in a major expansion that will push its purview beyond the NoSQL niche. According to a FoundationDB representative, "SQL Layer is the beginning of a new realm of multi-model database technology—one that automatically provides fault tolerance, performance and scale to SQL—the most widely used data model in the world. This is a huge step forward for many more layers, APIs and models to come."

SQL Layer is available to FoundationDB users now for production deployment. The platform has already enjoyed adoption by open source ecommerce platform Spree Commerce, FoundationDB reports.