How Directus 9 Is Revolutionizing Data Management: A Q&A with Directus Founder and CEO, Ben Haynes
More than two years in the making, Directus 9, the world’s first Open Data Platform, has been released for General Availability. The platform features a 100% JavaScript codebase, full support for any SQL vendor, and lightning-fast performance. The release comes on the heels of Directus reaching a huge milestone — 10 Million Docker downloads of the Directus App — underscoring the App’s popularity among the container-native developer community.
In this blog post, Directus Founder and CEO, Ben Haynes, explains the significance of the Directus 9 release, describes its key features, and provides insights into his company’s vision for the future of data management.
Q. What is Directus?
Directus 9 is a completely open-source, extensible and scalable Open Data Platform. It enables everyone in an organization, from technical users like developers and database administrators, to content authors and marketers, to data scientists to access and manage data securely for powering any type of data-driven app. Since it lays on top of your existing SQL database, there’s no need to migrate the data. Users can leverage the Directus App to interact with data from any source and pull it into their data-driven app without having to do any coding. The data remains unaltered and secure. Essentially, Directus democratizes data for all users, and enables organizations to maximize the value of their data.
Q. How is Directus 9 different from previous versions?
With a new codebase built entirely on Node.js and Vue.js 3, Directus 9 achieves 10X higher performance than previous PHP-based versions for near-instant SQL query responses, whether browsing vast datasets in the Directus App or performing deeply nested relational API requests. We’ve made numerous enhancements, as well, to meet the needs and requests of our developer community.
Q. What are some of the key features of the new release?
First of all, the platform has been refactored to be 100% Javascript, with support for all of the major SQL vendors. That includes MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite, Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle DB, and many other variants like MariaDB, AWS RedShift, AWS Aurora, and more. What this means is that developers are not locked into any one vendor — they can use Directus 9 to interface with nearly any SQL data source. Directus 9 delivers 10X I/O speeds over previous versions, with native support for caching via Redis or memory, and customizable filters and rules for extremely granular user permissions and advanced access control. Another big improvement is around authentication. We now support deep integrations for OAuth2, OpenID, and LDAP.
Directus 9 now enables users to export filtered data sets and generate schema migration files, making it easier to share your data in any format, including CSV, JSON, XML, or SQL. Other features include many-to-any relationships, nestable folders, displays, and much more. We’ve removed all of the barriers to accessing and using valuable data, providing a flexible, scalable, and intuitive solution to power any data-driven app or project.
Q. What is Directus Insights?
Directus Insights is a brand-new module in our platform that opens up a new way for organizations to derive actionable insights from their data. With Insights, you can leverage dynamic filtering to create customizable dashboards with charts and other visualizations, and quickly analyze and make sense of data. It’s a great feature for business users and data scientists because they can gain data insights at-a-glance, without having to write SQL queries or rely on a database administrator for access to the data. They can easily and securely pull it into the dashboards and start exploring and analyzing it right away.
Q. What does the release of Directus 9 signify for Directus and the direction of the company?
Over these past two years, our 2-person project has grown into a passionate team of 20 engineers and hundreds of contributors, all working tirelessly to reinvent Directus as the world’s first Open Data Platform. With Directus 9 going GA, this is a huge step forward for our company and for our community, whose contributions have been invaluable to making it happen. We’re tremendously grateful for the ongoing support and contributions of our developer community, and we will continue to optimize the developer experience with Directus, with a focus on stability, documentation, and testing.
Q. What companies are using Directus today?
Along with the GA announcement of Directus 9, we’re excited to announce that we’ve met a huge milestone on Docker, reaching 10 Million downloads on October 28, 2021. We continue to attract the attention of container-native developers on Docker, and as of November 30, 2021 we were at 12.5 Million downloads. Many of the world’s most forward-thinking brands use the Directus platform, including AT&T, Bose, Prada, TripAdvisor, HTC, the United States Navy, and more. As we expand our platform with on-demand and enterprise-level cloud offerings, we expect that roster will grow rapidly.
Q. How can people get Directus 9?
They can join the millions of developers who have downloaded the self-hosted, open-source App from Docker. It’s also available on GitHub and NPM, or they can look into one of our cloud offerings. We offer a 14-day trial for our standard cloud version, and enterprises looking for a more customized solution can contact us to discuss their specific needs. We invite anyone to check out our pricing page at https://directus.io/pricing/ for more information.
