Aeon's Surreal Renaissance

Welcome to Aeon’s Surreal Renaissance! This book takes you on a journey through the ins and outs of SurrealDB as you follow an immersive story crafted to make learning a new database feel as enjoyable as sitting back and watching your favourite movie.

The story

Aeon’s Surreal Renaissance follows in the footsteps of your alter ego as you use SurrealDB to restore civilization. The story happens in the future, one in which you are the main character. Your alter ego in the book is going to need a name, so we’ve chosen the name Aeon. Why Aeon? Two reasons:

• Many aeons have passed between today and the time in which this book starts.
• Aeon doesn’t bring any sort of person to mind, so it’s easy to imagine your alter ego as a person with this name no matter who you are. Compare that to names like Arnold or Isabella, which bring to mind certain people and ideas.

So what is the future for Aeon like? It’s not bad at all, but something odd has happened: for some reason humanity has lost most of its technology. People are once again riding horses, heating their houses with wood stoves, and writing books by hand one word at a time.

What could have happened? And what does SurrealDB have to do with a person who grew up in a world of this type?

All good questions. There’s a tunnel up in the mountains close to the town where Aeon lives that holds the secret. We’ll begin to find out in the next chapter where the story starts.

Using this book

The technique used in this book

This book follows a progress similar to that of the main character Aeon, who has never encountered databases or even any modern technology before. As such, it begins with the absolutely simplest parts of SurrealDB and proceeds step by step to more complex examples - along with a story to carry you through it all. This is a technique known as the “input hypothesis”, in which you as the reader gets a constant stream of input just above your current level - just enough to be interesting, but not enough to scare you away.

Which version of SurrealDB does this book use?

Aeon’s Surreal Renaissance teaches you the latest stable version of SurrealDB: version 2.X. If you have been using a 1.X version of SurrealDB before coming across this book, you will notice a lot of new functionality and some differences in behaviour.

The complete changelogs for SurrealDB’s newest 2.X versions can be seen at this link.

Querying with Surrealist

As SurrealDB’s official visual dashboard Surrealist is easy to embed inside web pages, many queries inside the book will have a runnable Surrealist drop-down window to give you the opportunity to experiment with it yourself. Give this one a try!

CREATE my:{ first: "surrealdb_record" };

However, as each code sample is followed by the output it is expected to generate, you can also simply read the book in a traditional form without needing to make any queries yourself.

Chapter quizzes

Most chapters have a quiz section with about five questions to test your knowledge of the chapter. Put together a quiz question of your own that you think would make a great addition? Let us know at our documentation repo and maybe it will end up in the book!

Let’s begin

Time to start the story! Let’s turn our attention to centuries in the future to see what the world looks like as Aeon’s adventure begins.