# FoundationDB 5.2

## Overview

FoundationDB is a distributed database designed to handle large volumes of structured data across clusters of commodity servers. It organizes data as an ordered key-value store and employs ACID transactions for all operations. It is especially well-suited for read/write workloads but also has excellent performance for write-intensive workloads. Users interact with the database using a API language binding. You can begin local development today.

## Documentation

FoundationDB is a robust choice for a broad range of use cases:

Developers can store all types of data. FoundationDB is multi-model, meaning you can store many types data in a single database. All data is safely stored, distributed, and replicated in FoundationDB.

Administrators easily scale and handle hardware failures. FoundationDB is easy to install, grow, and manage. It has a distributed architecture that gracefully scales out and handles faults while acting like a single ACID database.

FoundationDB has industry-leading performance. FoundationDB provides amazing performance on commodity hardware, allowing you to support very heavy loads at low cost.

FoundationDB supports flexible application architectures. Your application can talk directly to FoundationDB, to a layer, or both. Layers provide new capability on top of FoundationDB but are stateless.

The latest changes are detailed in Release Notes. The documentation has the following sections:

- Why FoundationDB describes the technical alternatives involved in NoSQL database design and explains the advantages of transaction processing at scale.
- Technical Overview explains the engineering design of FoundationDB, with detailed information on its features, architecture, and performance.
- Client Design contains documentation on getting started, data modeling, and design principles for building applications with FoundationDB.
- Design Recipes give specific examples of how to build new data models, indexes, and more on top of the key-value store API.
- API Reference give a detailed description of the API for each language.
- Tutorials provide simple examples of client design using FoundationDB.
- Administration contains documentation on administering FoundationDB.