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How do you think the next dominant Database platform will start? Is your expectation that innovation requires polish before hitting the (free open source) “mark

How do you think the next dominant Database platform will start? Is your expectation that innovation requires polish before hitting the (free open source) “marketplace”?

DaiPlusPlus 5y ago
My expectation is that the next dominant platform will offer something unique which creates enough value that I'm willing to overlook the unfinished parts that deduct value. When Neo4j and other graph databases went big in the past decade, they value they created: "finally! I don't have to faff around with RDBMS tables and Cobb purists to store and query my non-relational object-graph!" - despite the fact that Neo4j then (and still?) didn't support running serving databases concurrently or schema enforcement or even transactional atomicity (I think they fixed that recently?) So in this context, what business-value does PolarDB add or create that makes it worthwhile to deal with its expected short-life?
- tluyben2 5y ago
  It is alibaba: it's life might not be so short? They are huge and have a cloud provider arm.
  - oger 5y ago
    This! Very often the US centric community here on HN is underestimating the sheer size and expertise in Alibaba‘s cloud ecosystem.
- sa46 5y ago
  It’s distributed Postgres. The same reasons you would use Cockroach or Citus instead of stock Postgres also justify using polar. Given that there’s multiple companies that exist to scale out Postgres, someone sees business value.
- zwily 5y ago
  > It extends PostgreSQL to become a share-nothing distributed database, which supports global data consistency and ACID across database nodes, distributed SQL processing, and data redundancy and high availability through Paxos based replication. PolarDB is designed to add values and new features to PostgreSQL in dimensions of high performance, scalability, high availability, and elasticity. At the same time, PolarDB remains SQL compatibility to single-node PostgreSQL with best effort. That’s pretty compelling, if it delivers.
JohnHaugeland 5y ago
> How do you think the next dominant Database platform will start? Not this way.

How do you think the next dominant Database platform will start? Is your expectation that innovation requires polish before hitting the (free open source) “marketplace”?

DaiPlusPlus 5y ago

My expectation is that the next dominant platform will offer something unique which creates enough value that I'm willing to overlook the unfinished parts that deduct value. When Neo4j and other graph databases went big in the past decade, they value they created: "finally! I don't have to faff around with RDBMS tables and Cobb purists to store and query my non-relational object-graph!" - despite the fact that Neo4j then (and still?) didn't support running serving databases concurrently or schema enforcement or even transactional atomicity (I think they fixed that recently?) So in this context, what business-value does PolarDB add or create that makes it worthwhile to deal with its expected short-life?

tluyben2 5y ago
It is alibaba: it's life might not be so short? They are huge and have a cloud provider arm.
- oger 5y ago
  This! Very often the US centric community here on HN is underestimating the sheer size and expertise in Alibaba‘s cloud ecosystem.
sa46 5y ago
It’s distributed Postgres. The same reasons you would use Cockroach or Citus instead of stock Postgres also justify using polar. Given that there’s multiple companies that exist to scale out Postgres, someone sees business value.
zwily 5y ago
> It extends PostgreSQL to become a share-nothing distributed database, which supports global data consistency and ACID across database nodes, distributed SQL processing, and data redundancy and high availability through Paxos based replication. PolarDB is designed to add values and new features to PostgreSQL in dimensions of high performance, scalability, high availability, and elasticity. At the same time, PolarDB remains SQL compatibility to single-node PostgreSQL with best effort. That’s pretty compelling, if it delivers.

JohnHaugeland 5y ago

> How do you think the next dominant Database platform will start? Not this way.