4 ms·

(Some of these are options I've not looked deeper into - Fauna, Planetscale) This sentiment is perhaps right, but I was careful about calling out scale-to-zero

(Some of these are options I've not looked deeper into - Fauna, Planetscale) This sentiment is perhaps right, but I was careful about calling out scale-to-zero. We do have options that are zero cost (or pay as you use), but there's a fundamental difference in something that may be zero cost because a cloud provider is using it as a customer-acquisition ploy. Options like litestream+sqlite+s3, or what Neon seems to be, are verifiable you-pay-for-when-db-is-booted up, else the verifiable cost is storage only. So the trifecta that will be very productive for masses is 1) database where compute is scale-to-zero, 2)open source or commoditised, and 3) is RDBMS.

manigandham 4y ago
What is the effective difference to you? Technically all compute can enter hibernation by dumping RAM (or just using virtualized memory backed only by SSDs). CockroachDB already does true scale-to-zero if that's your requirement: https://www.cockroachlabs.com/blog/how-we-built-cockroachdb-serverless/ https://www.cockroachlabs.com/blog/how-we-built-cockroachdb-...
- anilgulecha 4y ago
  The effective difference is commoditization of the paradigm - there's confidence in a commodity technology that a proprietary cannot give (standardized use and wide support and community, multiple providers, self-hosting). Eg: of innovation -> commodity. EC2 was innovative, but is today common-place. S3 was the same. DBs that scale-to-zero have not reached that state yet. Thanks for the link on cockroachdb - it sounds promising. I wonder what's the minimum self-deployable unit of cockroachdb - will google around a bit.
  - manigandham 4y ago
    > "minimum self-deployable unit of cockroachdb" If you host it yourself, or use their dedicated enterprise clusters then you still have instances which are individual (virtual) servers. The serverless model has no instances exposed to you and instead is a multitenant architecture that uses a pool of shared compute nodes with a routing layer that intercepts and introspects your connection to load up your specific database context for query processing.
  - ignoramous 4y ago
    I think it is more "market leadership" than commoditization that's working in favour of the MySQL-Postgres duopoly.
nikita 4y ago
There is a big difference between in architecture between Neon and PlanetScale, CockroachDb, and Yugabyte. Neon is shared storage (storage is distributed but shared) and the others are shared nothing. Shared nothing systems are hard to build with supporting all the features of the base system. E.g. https://vitess.io/docs/13.0/reference/compatibility/mysql-compatibility/ https://vitess.io/docs/13.0/reference/compatibility/mysql-co.... Neon is 100% compatible from Postgres b/c we didn't (or almost didn't) change the Postgres engine.

manigandham 4y ago

What is the effective difference to you? Technically all compute can enter hibernation by dumping RAM (or just using virtualized memory backed only by SSDs). CockroachDB already does true scale-to-zero if that's your requirement: https://www.cockroachlabs.com/blog/how-we-built-cockroachdb-serverless/ https://www.cockroachlabs.com/blog/how-we-built-cockroachdb-...

anilgulecha 4y ago
The effective difference is commoditization of the paradigm - there's confidence in a commodity technology that a proprietary cannot give (standardized use and wide support and community, multiple providers, self-hosting). Eg: of innovation -> commodity. EC2 was innovative, but is today common-place. S3 was the same. DBs that scale-to-zero have not reached that state yet. Thanks for the link on cockroachdb - it sounds promising. I wonder what's the minimum self-deployable unit of cockroachdb - will google around a bit.
- manigandham 4y ago
  > "minimum self-deployable unit of cockroachdb" If you host it yourself, or use their dedicated enterprise clusters then you still have instances which are individual (virtual) servers. The serverless model has no instances exposed to you and instead is a multitenant architecture that uses a pool of shared compute nodes with a routing layer that intercepts and introspects your connection to load up your specific database context for query processing.
- ignoramous 4y ago
  I think it is more "market leadership" than commoditization that's working in favour of the MySQL-Postgres duopoly.

nikita 4y ago

There is a big difference between in architecture between Neon and PlanetScale, CockroachDb, and Yugabyte. Neon is shared storage (storage is distributed but shared) and the others are shared nothing. Shared nothing systems are hard to build with supporting all the features of the base system. E.g. https://vitess.io/docs/13.0/reference/compatibility/mysql-compatibility/ https://vitess.io/docs/13.0/reference/compatibility/mysql-co.... Neon is 100% compatible from Postgres b/c we didn't (or almost didn't) change the Postgres engine.