I don't know the history / timeline of Honeycomb, but was FoundationDB available open source when they decided to write their own DB?
If I ever would find myself walking into building-my-own-database-territory, I would probably first try to reach for FoundationDB and see if that could work.
I've just played around with it, but it seems like a great tool for building high performant and robust distributed databases on top of.
According to GitHub, no, but it may have been available before then. Regardless, the design of Honeycomb's database(store?) aligns more with an analytical workload, which FoundationDB lists as a non-goal. It may not have been a good fit then or even now.
If I ever would find myself walking into building-my-own-database-territory, I would probably first try to reach for FoundationDB and see if that could work.
I've just played around with it, but it seems like a great tool for building high performant and robust distributed databases on top of.