6 ms·

> It will be interesting if Amazon and Microsoft choose to compete with Google on this service. If we get to the point where you have databases, compute, storag

by kornish 10y ago

> It will be interesting if Amazon and Microsoft choose to compete with Google on this service. If we get to the point where you have databases, compute, storage, and connectivity services from those three at equal scale, well that would be a lot of choice for the developers! There are also plenty of choices evolving for developers who aren't looking for hosted solutions (which can sometimes be a showstopper for enterprise on-prem deployments). There's a growing ecosystem of distributed open-source databases to look out for too. Take Citus, for instance – a Postgres-compatible distributed store which automatically parallelizes normal SQL queries across machines. It's as easy to set up as adding an extension, and people are doing some staggering things in prod with it. Different audience from BigQuery and Spanner, but no less exciting. Disclaimer: no professional association, but love their product and the team.

craigkerstiens 10y ago
Craig from Citus here. Thanks for the kind words. We've seen a lot of people scale-out transactional workloads with Citus as well. In particular, we've seen a lot of multi-tenant apps that need to keep scaling beyond a single node when they're running into memory or compute issues. If you are looking for something that is more Postgres flavored (meaning we're just an extension to it so you get all the good stuff of Postgres such as JSONB, PostGIS, etc.) then we hope we'd be a good fit. And we run a managed service on top of AWS as well (https://www.citusdata.com/product/cloud https://www.citusdata.com/product/cloud) built by the team that built Heroku Postgres. If curious on pricing you can find it at https://www.citusdata.com/pricing/ https://www.citusdata.com/pricing/
- sandGorgon 10y ago
  It would be very interesting to have your product at the 200-300$ pricepoint. Currently, the lowest tier starts at almost 2000$ per month for the high availability version. I'm not trying to compare on a per-mb level, but it would be nice for smaller scale workloads.
  - craigkerstiens 10y ago
    Helpful feedback, we do have a development plan for $99, but it's not really intended for production workloads. If you only have 10 GB of data we'd heavily recommend going with something like RDS or Heroku Postgres. At that amount of data single node Postgres works great.
    - sandGorgon 10y ago
      RDS is not single node - its multi-AZ replicated. And that's what we are paying 300$ instead of 99$ for. Imagine.. RDS is literally the ONLY place where you can buy a 10 GB data multi-AZ replicated, snapshotted and managed postgresql. Its pretty much a monopoly, now that Google seems to have officially closed the book on ever supporting postgresql.
      - ShaneOG 10y ago
        > Imagine.. RDS is literally the ONLY place where you can buy a 10 GB data multi-AZ replicated, snapshotted and managed postgresql. Not true. I was looking for a hosted Postgres provider and discovered these two: https://aiven.io/postgresql https://aiven.io/postgresql (tried it, worked excellently) https://www.elephantsql.com https://www.elephantsql.com
      - tscanausa 10y ago
        > now that Google seems to have officially closed the book on ever supporting postgresql. I would be hesitant to say that this is a fact.
      - poooogles 10y ago
        >Google seems to have officially closed the book on ever supporting postgresql. Er, that's a bet I'd strongly suggest you didn't make.
        ecnahc515 10y ago
        Right? Apps written to use Postgres aren't just going to be re-written to use Spanner. If anything, hosted Postgres from Google Cloud will be priced in a way that makes Spanner some what more attractive, as a way to get conversions to Spanner in the long-run.
mistermann 10y ago
As someone who works (in part) in the MS SQL field, is it irrational to be a bit worried about the effects some of these platform advances might have one one's career? For example, being a MSSQL performance tuning expert requires years of experience and probably pays very well, but just the other day I read an anecdotal story where someone switched a large BI database to use columnar indexes, allowing them to replace very complex (extreme manual tuning to achieve acceptable performance) queries with just standard SQL with comparable performance. How long until the scale, pricing, and now transparent & full(?) sql compliance offered by these cloud platforms starts to make traditional RDBMS platforms a niche platform?
- aaronblohowiak 10y ago
  Microsoft has a history of sales and support that will allow them a certain longevity. They also have less "brand hate" than Oracle. I dont think MSSQL is going to be like Sybase any time soon, but I probably wouldn't focus on that stack starting now if you are into the startup or california scene. For many places in the USA, MS is the way to go. EDIT: Also, most DB users don't need global-scale databases.
  - Godel_unicode 10y ago
    Not sure if this is what you intended, but you are aware that SQL server was developed in partnership with Sybase until the mid-90s (when they were substantially the same product) right?
    - aaronblohowiak 10y ago
      Neat history! I was not aware of that! I meant to imply that sybase's rdbms offering is no longer a big player and I would not want to bet the future of my career on being an expert in it.
  - mistermann 10y ago
    I'm not saying MS is going to abandon the platform, but to me it seems entirely possible that "very soon" these cloud platforms using cheap, shared, commodity hardware might be so affordable and technically capable that it might be a no brainer choice unless you have a very good reason to use MSSQL (kind of the opposite today, on-prem by default, cloud if necessary).

by kornish 10y ago

craigkerstiens 10y ago

Craig from Citus here. Thanks for the kind words. We've seen a lot of people scale-out transactional workloads with Citus as well. In particular, we've seen a lot of multi-tenant apps that need to keep scaling beyond a single node when they're running into memory or compute issues. If you are looking for something that is more Postgres flavored (meaning we're just an extension to it so you get all the good stuff of Postgres such as JSONB, PostGIS, etc.) then we hope we'd be a good fit. And we run a managed service on top of AWS as well (https://www.citusdata.com/product/cloud https://www.citusdata.com/product/cloud) built by the team that built Heroku Postgres. If curious on pricing you can find it at https://www.citusdata.com/pricing/ https://www.citusdata.com/pricing/

sandGorgon 10y ago
It would be very interesting to have your product at the 200-300$ pricepoint. Currently, the lowest tier starts at almost 2000$ per month for the high availability version. I'm not trying to compare on a per-mb level, but it would be nice for smaller scale workloads.
- craigkerstiens 10y ago
  Helpful feedback, we do have a development plan for $99, but it's not really intended for production workloads. If you only have 10 GB of data we'd heavily recommend going with something like RDS or Heroku Postgres. At that amount of data single node Postgres works great.
  - sandGorgon 10y ago
    RDS is not single node - its multi-AZ replicated. And that's what we are paying 300$ instead of 99$ for. Imagine.. RDS is literally the ONLY place where you can buy a 10 GB data multi-AZ replicated, snapshotted and managed postgresql. Its pretty much a monopoly, now that Google seems to have officially closed the book on ever supporting postgresql.
    - ShaneOG 10y ago
      > Imagine.. RDS is literally the ONLY place where you can buy a 10 GB data multi-AZ replicated, snapshotted and managed postgresql. Not true. I was looking for a hosted Postgres provider and discovered these two: https://aiven.io/postgresql https://aiven.io/postgresql (tried it, worked excellently) https://www.elephantsql.com https://www.elephantsql.com
    - tscanausa 10y ago
      > now that Google seems to have officially closed the book on ever supporting postgresql. I would be hesitant to say that this is a fact.
    - poooogles 10y ago
      >Google seems to have officially closed the book on ever supporting postgresql. Er, that's a bet I'd strongly suggest you didn't make.
      - ecnahc515 10y ago
        Right? Apps written to use Postgres aren't just going to be re-written to use Spanner. If anything, hosted Postgres from Google Cloud will be priced in a way that makes Spanner some what more attractive, as a way to get conversions to Spanner in the long-run.

mistermann 10y ago

As someone who works (in part) in the MS SQL field, is it irrational to be a bit worried about the effects some of these platform advances might have one one's career? For example, being a MSSQL performance tuning expert requires years of experience and probably pays very well, but just the other day I read an anecdotal story where someone switched a large BI database to use columnar indexes, allowing them to replace very complex (extreme manual tuning to achieve acceptable performance) queries with just standard SQL with comparable performance. How long until the scale, pricing, and now transparent & full(?) sql compliance offered by these cloud platforms starts to make traditional RDBMS platforms a niche platform?

aaronblohowiak 10y ago
Microsoft has a history of sales and support that will allow them a certain longevity. They also have less "brand hate" than Oracle. I dont think MSSQL is going to be like Sybase any time soon, but I probably wouldn't focus on that stack starting now if you are into the startup or california scene. For many places in the USA, MS is the way to go. EDIT: Also, most DB users don't need global-scale databases.
- Godel_unicode 10y ago
  Not sure if this is what you intended, but you are aware that SQL server was developed in partnership with Sybase until the mid-90s (when they were substantially the same product) right?
  - aaronblohowiak 10y ago
    Neat history! I was not aware of that! I meant to imply that sybase's rdbms offering is no longer a big player and I would not want to bet the future of my career on being an expert in it.
- mistermann 10y ago
  I'm not saying MS is going to abandon the platform, but to me it seems entirely possible that "very soon" these cloud platforms using cheap, shared, commodity hardware might be so affordable and technically capable that it might be a no brainer choice unless you have a very good reason to use MSSQL (kind of the opposite today, on-prem by default, cloud if necessary).