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We already have it with YugabyteDB, which is open source (unlike Neon), but doesn't seem to be the success story it should have been. At least I've heard barely

We already have it with YugabyteDB, which is open source (unlike Neon), but doesn't seem to be the success story it should have been. At least I've heard barely a peep about it. Maybe they're not so great at marketing. Yugabyte is architected similarly to other similar databases, with an SQL layer on top of a distributed, replicated key/value store based on RocksDB. The different being that the SQL layer is Postgres. Yugabyte tightly couples the two, though, though it seems like this is mostly for convenience, in that the "TServer" (tablet server) is managed by Yugabyte itself. I wonder if it could support an architecture more similar to TiDB, where the storage is independently scalable from compute. CockroachDB and TiDB are based on a similar design, but Yugabyte stands out as being a "real" Postgres. It even supports normal Postgres extensions via "CREATE EXTENSION".

eqoram 3y ago
Did I miss something? I always thought that Neon is open source.
- atombender 3y ago
  For some reason I thought it wasn't open source. Looks like I'm wrong!
vineyardmike 3y ago
I mostly agree with the commenter you’re replying to - but I think you bring up a good point. Once you start disconnecting tables from one another, and end up with lots of small data stores, does it still make sense to bother with the Postgres at all? I think that its value as a layer becomes unclear. Sure its battle-tested and has great query planning and similar tools, but those base based on assumptions that are largely violated with the re-architecture. I think the architectural decoupling benefits mentioned are basically already proven though. I’ve worked at places that had many NoSQL tables per team, each logically distinct, and at places that had one database with 50+ tables in it. The breakup can be nice, in the same way that “serverless” is nice - data storage becomes entirely abstracted to the developer.
nikita 3y ago
Neon is open source and under a good license: Apache 2
nikita 3y ago
The problem that shared nothing systems lose compatibility with the single node system. So planetscale and yugabyte are not 100% compatible with Postgres. They are also very expensive at the low end hence the free tiers are discontinued. I have a thread about it on twitter: https://x.com/nikitabase/status/1723579854266966399?s=46 https://x.com/nikitabase/status/1723579854266966399?s=46
nikita 3y ago
One thing that is very important is what you charge for. Software or service. We are only charging for the cloud service and it has major implications in the “company architecture”. When you charge for software like yuga and roach and for the cloud you end up with two companies in one. Counterexample is snowflake - they got it right !

eqoram 3y ago

Did I miss something? I always thought that Neon is open source.

atombender 3y ago
For some reason I thought it wasn't open source. Looks like I'm wrong!

vineyardmike 3y ago

I mostly agree with the commenter you’re replying to - but I think you bring up a good point. Once you start disconnecting tables from one another, and end up with lots of small data stores, does it still make sense to bother with the Postgres at all? I think that its value as a layer becomes unclear. Sure its battle-tested and has great query planning and similar tools, but those base based on assumptions that are largely violated with the re-architecture. I think the architectural decoupling benefits mentioned are basically already proven though. I’ve worked at places that had many NoSQL tables per team, each logically distinct, and at places that had one database with 50+ tables in it. The breakup can be nice, in the same way that “serverless” is nice - data storage becomes entirely abstracted to the developer.

nikita 3y ago

Neon is open source and under a good license: Apache 2

nikita 3y ago

The problem that shared nothing systems lose compatibility with the single node system. So planetscale and yugabyte are not 100% compatible with Postgres. They are also very expensive at the low end hence the free tiers are discontinued. I have a thread about it on twitter: https://x.com/nikitabase/status/1723579854266966399?s=46 https://x.com/nikitabase/status/1723579854266966399?s=46

nikita 3y ago

One thing that is very important is what you charge for. Software or service. We are only charging for the cloud service and it has major implications in the “company architecture”. When you charge for software like yuga and roach and for the cloud you end up with two companies in one. Counterexample is snowflake - they got it right !