10 ms·

EdgeDB is now Gel and Postgres is the future

165 points by mmastrac 2y ago

NetOpWibby 2y ago
> To oversimplify, Gel to Postgres is what TypeScript is to JavaScript. I've been using EdgeDB for years (from RethinkDB and MongoDB before that) and it's my favorite database. I don't need to memorize SQL commands and I get a pretty UI to look at my data if my queries introduce issues.
- 1st1 2y ago
  <3
1st1 2y ago
Co-founder here - AMA.
- Scramblejams 2y ago
  I'm working on some server-side Swift, and it's feeling very promising. Any plans for a Swift client library?
  - 1st1 2y ago
    Not in the immediate future, but we have a member in our community who's building something. We'll see if they get near the finishing line.
- federalauth 2y ago
  Congrats on the rebrand and launch! Biggest reasons to use Gel over Supabase?
  - kelthuzad 2y ago
    Just a user here, but I'd say there are many reasons, one of those reasons is in your name: auth. GelDB's auth is versatile and doesn't cost a dime, while Supabase auth is only free up until 50,000 monthly active users, then it costs $0.00325 per MAU (> 100k MAU). I personally just love its query language and the typescript query builder.
  - 1st1 2y ago
    Good question. We’re indeed similar products. Gel is somewhat similar to Supabase on the surface—both run on Postgres, both have Auth, and both offer AI features, a CLI, and a UI, among other similarities. However, there’s a big difference beneath the surface: Gel comes with a high-level data model (abstract types, mixins, access policies) that replaces tables and joins. It’s still relational (and we’re about to publish a paper on that), but it’s more high level, strict, and yet more flexible. On top of that, we have a built-in migration system (where schema is a first-class citizen), a performance-tuned network protocol, and a query language called EdgeQL, which is like a child of SQL and GraphQL. These are just a few of our “deep” features. All in all, Gel is a fresh take on day-to-day database development. We cut no corners in trying to push the core database developer experience forward.
- atombender 2y ago
  Looks like you changed your site and broke current links. For example, searching for EdgeQL gives me this as the first hit: https://docs.edgedb.com/database/edgeql https://docs.edgedb.com/database/edgeql. That redirects to https://docs.geldata.com/database/edgeql https://docs.geldata.com/database/edgeql, which is 404.
  - 1st1 2y ago
    Yeah, we'll be repairing this shortly. FWIW we're completely revamping our documentation, it's almost a full rewrite, focused on bringing clarity and logic to the navigation, improving search, etc. We should fully wrap it up in a week or two.
- armincerf 2y ago
  It says gel is to Postgres what typescript is to JavaScript, so can I add gel to an existing Postgres instance and get the benefits of the nicer query language or does it rely on special tables? If I use some other extension like timescale is that compatible with gel? And is there a story for replication/subscribing to queries for real time updates? Postgres is so powerful partly because of its ecosystem, so I want to know how much of that ecosystem is still useable if I’m using gel on top of Postgres
  - 1st1 2y ago
    In the just released new version we've added SQL support, so now you can use SQL taking full advantage of our data model (access policies, mixins, etc) and the network protocol (automatic recovery on network & transaction error, automatic connection pooling on client/sever). We'll continue bridging the gap to make it easier for companies to adopt Gel for an existing database. We either will invest in creating a tool for migration, or maybe some more exciting options we're currently pondering on.
  - RedCrowbar 2y ago
    (article author here) > If I use some other extension like timescale is that compatible with gel [...] Postgres is so powerful partly because of its ecosystem, so I want to know how much of that ecosystem is still useable if I’m using gel on top of Postgres Playing nice with the ecosystem is the goal. We started off with more of a walled garden, but with 6.0 a lot of those walls came down with direct SQL support and support for standalone extensions [1]. There is a blog post coming about this specifically tomorrow (I think). > And is there a story for replication Replication/failover works out of the box. > subscribing to queries for real time updates? Working on it. > so can I add gel to an existing Postgres instance and get the benefits of the nicer query language or does it rely on special tables? Gel is built around its schema, so you will need to import your SQL schema. After that you can query things with EdgeQL (or SQL/ORM as before). [1] https://github.com/geldata/gel-postgis https://github.com/geldata/gel-postgis
- keruli 2y ago
  Was the rebrand really just for simplicity and clarity? It seems like a lot of work to change the name when it was already a pretty established toolchain, not just for your team, but, and this is more important, for your community. I actually think EdgeDB was a far better name. It actually meant something; yes, it wasn't a pure graph database, but it did work with the general concept of graphs and edges. Gel means nothing. Even the domain name: geldata.com makes no sense. You're not selling or creating data, it's a database system/layer. I've been a true evangelist for EdgeDB over the last two years, but this has really irked me - irrationally so, I'm aware(!), but I just can't see the benefits outweighing the drawbacks here. It feels like it has to have been a result of some legal action or something. And just as LLMs were starting to catch up with their knowledge cutoff to include EdgeDB too! Now it'll be another two years until they know what you're talking about again. I know, first world problems. Is the query language name changing, by the way? Or is that still EdgeQL? Please let sanity prevail over at least one thing and don't call it "jel-q-ell"!
  - 1st1 2y ago
    EdgeQL stays EdgeQL :) I like that name. I also liked EdgeDB (I'm biased, I coined that name myself). But at every conference we had the same conversation with developers: "EdgeDB? Huh, must be an edge-computing database. Are you running SQLite?" There are other minor reasons for the rename, but this annoyance persisted for a number of years and we decided to pull the plug on it. > I've been a true evangelist for EdgeDB over the last two years Thank you. This means a lot.
    - re-thc 2y ago
      > But at every conference we had the same conversation with developers I wonder if this will really go away or just be replaced with something else. Is it really the name "specifically" or how a lot of people work? (i.e. going by first impressions, connotations, memes, etc) > "EdgeDB? Huh, must be an edge-computing database. Are you running SQLite?" "Gel? Huh, must be for cosmetics. Is this for retail?" p.s. had no issues with EdgeDB.
      - 2y ago
- d0100 2y ago
  How to deal with eventual slow queries? I currently have a system with complex queries with a lot of joins where I had to create a custom materialized table These queries also deal with permissions & realtime scheduling so endpoint caching doesn't solve it Have gel users hit any performance issues, and how have they dealt with them?
  - 1st1 2y ago
    We're shipping a slow query log UI in this version to continuously monitor queries in your system. Our users do get performance issues, usually because they start really using our data model to its full potential, creating tens / hundreds complex access policies, 100-lines long EdgeQL queries etc. We have EXPLAIN command to deal with, and we also support our customers directly helping them understand and fix their system. All of the findings trickle down to the core product so that the rest can benefit too.
- plagiarist 2y ago
  I was hoping to learn more but many of the docs.geldata.com links on the GitHub page are 404 right now, mentioning just in case nobody has reported that yet.
  - 1st1 2y ago
    We'll be fixing them shortly. We're rolling out a new documentation system. Apologies for the inconvenience.
- 999900000999 2y ago
  3 questions. How does this compare to solutions like Supabase. What stands out with Supabase is the sdk support. My current project is probably going to stay on Supabase( it's a hobbyist project regardless), but hypothetically if I was an enterprise prospect how would you pitch your solution. Do you support functions, that I could call from the client for more advanced logic that can't be done with queries ? Why not brand as GelDB. Would probably be easier to Google. Plus it tells me instantly what your selling. PS: Can you offer something like a hobbyist tier for 10$ a month. I don't want to deal with my project randomly shutting off, but I have extremely low requirements in terms of storage during development.
  - 1st1 2y ago
    > How does this compare to solutions like Supabase. Supabase is great and works well if you want vanilla (more or less) Postgres with some integrations ready to go. With Gel you get a Postgres with a data layer on top. If you want to have a data model with abstract types & mixins that's easy to work with and scale in complexity, advanced access control, built-in migrations schema engine, hierarchical graph query language on top of SQL, more robust client libraries -- that's Gel. Gel is opinionated and vertically integrated and that's it's core strength. All of its components were developed in tandem -- from the network protocol to client APIs, from the EdgeQL query language to the data model to the migrations engine and so forth. It provides more cohesive experience and can give you non-trivial performance and DX gains if you commit to it. > but hypothetically if I was an enterprise prospect how would you pitch your solution. Total TypeSafety enforced at all levels, built-in migrations engine, best in class access control (we'll be blogging about our access control vs RLS soon.) > Do you support functions, that I could call from the client for more advanced logic that can't be done with queries ? With Gel 6 we'll be announcing the new `net` module tomorrow (spoiler!). You'll be able to schedule HTTP calls from triggers/queries/functions. > Why not brand as GelDB. Would probably be easier to Google. Plus it tells me instantly what your selling. Well, rebranding from Gel to GelDB would be just a text change to the homepage, so hypothetically the door is open for that. But I hope we can make Gel work, just the same way it works for Render/Neon/Fly. > PS: Can you offer something like a hobbyist tier for 10$ a month. Stay tuned, we'll announce some news on that in a couple of days! :)
- adsharma 2y ago
  How do you reconcile DB schema with strong types vs RPC schema? Have you looked into interop with typespec?
  - 1st1 2y ago
    For TypeScript, tRPC mostly just works out of the gate, if I understand the question fully.
- xanth 2y ago
  Do you have any plans/aspirations in adding Temporal "immutable DB" functionality? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temporal_database https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temporal_database [1] https://github.com/scalegenius/pg_bitemporal/blob/master/docs/bitemporal.md https://github.com/scalegenius/pg_bitemporal/blob/master/doc... [2] https://github.com/ifad/chronomodel https://github.com/ifad/chronomodel
  - RedCrowbar 2y ago
    You can use access policies [1] to emulate temporal data. See an example in [2] [1] https://docs.geldata.com/reference/datamodel/access_policies https://docs.geldata.com/reference/datamodel/access_policies [2] https://github.com/geldata/gel/issues/4228#issuecomment-1208496138 https://github.com/geldata/gel/issues/4228#issuecomment-1208...
- krashidov 2y ago
  If I have an existing postgres db how hard is it to migrate? Can I write regular joins if I need to? Do you have plans or do you already support db branching ?
  - 1st1 2y ago
    > If I have an existing postgres db how hard is it to migrate? The main hurdle would to migrate the schema. You'll have to define your schema in Gel (take a look at the reference here [1]) and write a script to copy your data. We are discussing internally how we can simplify this process, this is becoming a popular question. > Can I write regular joins if I need to? You can use EdgeQL and SQL side by side now though one connection in the same function. Gel's schema is still relational (even though it's more powerful with features like multiple inheritance). This page describes the details [2] of how SQL works with our schema (spoiler: it's very straightforward and no different from a hardcoded SQL schema). > Do you have plans or do you already support db branching ? We call Postgres databases "branches" in Gel. And we have tooling around them [3] to have git-like experience with them. Conceptually you can map (manually) your Gel branches to your Git branches if you wish. [1] https://docs.geldata.com/reference/datamodel https://docs.geldata.com/reference/datamodel [2] https://docs.geldata.com/reference/reference/sql_adapter#querying https://docs.geldata.com/reference/reference/sql_adapter#que... [3] https://docs.geldata.com/reference/cli/gel_branch https://docs.geldata.com/reference/cli/gel_branch
    - krashidov 2y ago
      Thank you for the response! This is great info. > The main hurdle would to migrate the schema I'm sure you know this but I know drizzle lets you generate schemas from an existing db. Not sure how applicable that is to Gel. https://orm.drizzle.team/docs/drizzle-kit-pull https://orm.drizzle.team/docs/drizzle-kit-pull > We call Postgres databases "branches" in Gel. And we have tooling around them [3] to have git-like experience with them. Sounds like it's a yes - thanks!
alangou 2y ago
Tried many ORMs to get them to work in SQL, but EdgeDB's was the one that worked extremely straightforwardly, literally without any issues that weren't due to not following the instructions. No bugs, no configuration errors, no nothing. It all just worked. So I think you guys deserve more recognition and credit for what is clearly a very well-engineered product that I intend to use for some of my personal projects.
- purplerabbit 2y ago
  Have you tried drizzle? If so, what's your beef? (The only one I've had is lack of down-migrations)
  - 1st1 2y ago
    Addressing your core question: Drizzle is a great ORM with a tastefully designed API—it's clearly a product of love. But it’s still an ORM, and it’s confined by certain design boundaries that come from being a library. For example, what if you want to use TypeScript, Go, and Python on your backend? Do you run three ORMs, each with different APIs? With Gel, you have one data model and a unified querying layer—the true source of truth. We have a blog post about that and more [1]. --- By the way, if you visit Drizzle’s website, you’ll see that Gel is one of their biggest sponsors. We worked closely with Drizzle to ship a first-class integration with Gel. You can use Gel’s schema and migrations, and Drizzle will just work. You can even use the Drizzle query builder and EdgeQL side by side if you want. [1] https://www.geldata.com/blog/a-solution-to-the-sql-vs-orm-dilemma https://www.geldata.com/blog/a-solution-to-the-sql-vs-orm-di...
    - valenterry 2y ago
      > Do you run three ORMs, each with different APIs? Yes and you absolutely have to. That's not a disadvantage, it's just how it is. Because SQL is the absolute bare minimum. The lowest common standard. And not a great one. Null handling and typesystem for example are way inferior to those of good programming languages. So why would I leave those productivity gains on the table? Using EdgeQL simple means I have another programming language at hand. > EdgeDB has a robust type system that's most [sic] comprehensive that most ORMs Well yeah. And it is inferior to the programming language I use. Hence, this comes at a disadvantage to me. > We've also built a query builder for TypeScript Aha, so then... why not build a query builder for every language, just like with ORMs? Sorry, not convinced. We would be better off by improving on SQL itself.
hiccuphippo 2y ago
Ok, but is it gel as in gif or gel as in gif?
- RedCrowbar 2y ago
  Gel as in gif obviously! :-)
- sieabahlpark 2y ago
  [dead]
atombender 2y ago
> PostgreSQL's query planner/optimizer is decidedly state-of-the-art Postgres's cost-based planner is good, but it's a decidedly 1980s design, predating the famous but also outdated Volcano/Cascades systems (used by Microsoft SQL Server and CockroachDB and others). So much has happened in the field of query optimization in the last 30 years, very little of which has ended up in Postgres, I think. Postgres has gotten parallel workers and a JIT, but the fundamental design is largely unchanged. It's also quite conservative about adding improvements; other databases has had some variation of index skip scans for ages (Oracle has probably had it for 20 years now, and you can get it through the TimeScale extension), but Postgres is still working on supporting it natively. The state of the art is arguably Umbra [1], a research project by Thomas Neumann's group at the university of Munich, the successor to HyPer, which is now being commercialized as CedarDB. Their analysis of the Postgres query planner is an interesting read [2]. [1] https://umbra-db.com/ https://umbra-db.com/ [2] https://www.vldb.org/pvldb/vol9/p204-leis.pdf https://www.vldb.org/pvldb/vol9/p204-leis.pdf
- paulryanrogers 2y ago
  How does MySQL compare? I get the sense that innovations land there sooner because of all the mega corps that use it.
  - re-thc 2y ago
    A lot of the work is now part of MySQL Heatwave, the paid Oracle / cloud edition.
  - sgarland 2y ago
    MySQL hasn’t had nearly as many innovations. That said, for a long time, it was often faster for simpler queries, and especially range queries, IFF your schema was designed to exploit the fact that it’s a clustering index, so rows are physically located next to the PK. If you’re using UUIDv4 PKs, you’re throwing away its entire advantage, and Postgres will almost certainly be faster. One notable exception for MySQL is INSTANT DDL in 8.x, thanks to contributions from Tencent, which is an extremely nice QoL upgrade that Postgres doesn’t have. The other is logical replication, something Postgres does support now (and has for several years), but didn’t for a long time.
5Qn8mNbc2FNCiVV 2y ago
Just wish the local development story wasn't so bound to a installation or the concept of instances. I just want a compose file in my repositories that starts Postgres and "Gel" separately with the option to execute commands within the container I mean, I don't need it anymore because I did it myself now, but it definitely annoys me that it's not first class
- 5Qn8mNbc2FNCiVV 2y ago
  Btw, I want to start them separately because we deploy a standard HA Postgres cluster and want to rely on proven tooling.
  - RedCrowbar 2y ago
    That's already supported, you just need to set the Postgres cluster URI in the `GEL_SERVER_BACKEND_DSN` env var ([1]). [1] https://docs.geldata.com/reference/reference/environment#gel-server-backend-dsn https://docs.geldata.com/reference/reference/environment#gel...
- RedCrowbar 2y ago
  You can use Docker (and Docker Compose) with Gel for local development [1], but of course you'd miss out on most management features of the CLI, because it's not built to supplant the docker/docker-compose CLI. Are there any particular issues you have currently with the Docker image approach? [1] https://docs.geldata.com/resources/guides/deployment/docker https://docs.geldata.com/resources/guides/deployment/docker
mrbluecoat 2y ago
An odd naming decision from an SEO perspective.
- sea-gold 2y ago
  Agreed. EdgeDB may not have been representative of the product (or the best name), but at least it was unique.
- flessner 2y ago
  A great naming decision if you want to make it look like a new product category: sql, redis, s3, gel... Fits right in.
pier25 2y ago
is the pricing per database or per cluster/account?
- RedCrowbar 2y ago
  Strictly speaking we charge for compute and storage. You can create variously-sized Gel instances and within those instances an arbitrary number of branches.
  - pier25 2y ago
    so I can have multiple free dev dbs using 1/4 compute unit?
    - 1st1 2y ago
      We give you 1GB of space for free. I think you can fit three or four branches in that. But we'll announce a cheaper tier this week (spoiler!) with the same amount of disk space.
kelseydh 2y ago
Postgres is great, but the level of work required to scale it on large workloads is really quite overwhelming. You really need expert-level knowledge to scale it. Just ask anybody who has had to shard their database.
- genewitch 2y ago
  I ran a 4000qps postgres database set to use no more than 640KB of RAM (its in the configs). The DBA was having fun with my silly idea until Slow-Query takes 10 seconds and we flipped back over to the production systems with much more allowed memory for postgres. My purpose was to show that Linux itself is pretty fast at caching and paging, even if Postgres was hamstrung. The db actually ran fine except for the slow queries, and we probably could have cleaned them up, too. But I proved my point. DB was ~300GB, metal had 512GB RAM. This was in 2012.
  - dano 2y ago
    Yep. I converted a business from to Postgres in 2004 and never looked back. Stable, reliable, no surprises. Postgres is the answer until proven otherwise.
  - sgarland 2y ago
    No offense, but 4000 QPS is not large. I ran a 100K+ QPS MySQL instance with 384 GiB of RAM. This is all subjective, of course, but I wouldn’t call 100K QPS large, either. It’s getting on the high end of what you might reasonably want to handle without horizontal scaling, but it’s still not “large.”
    - genewitch 2y ago
      postgres served 4000qps while restricted to 640 kilobytes of memory.
      - sgarland 2y ago
        I am so sorry; I conflated your comment with the sibling from zeeg.
jackfischer 2y ago
Tight integration with the typescript tool chain has been great for us with edgeql and is about an order of magnitude less error prone than ORMs I've interacted with. Gel is a winning formula especially in the typescript world.
- 1st1 2y ago
  Thank you Jack!
seer 2y ago
What is the self-hosting story I wonder? If we have our own Postgres db (placed in a specific region for compliance), and we put gel onto our k8s cluster as they state in their docs, does it work well? I assume this type of deployment is free right? What features are we missing from their cloud offering? GCP has very cool high availability, backup and monitoring features that I’d hate to loose if we move to their cloud offering. Can you configure which region your data is in? Can you put it behind / inside a VPC? Couldn’t really find that info in the docs / pricing pages.
- 1st1 2y ago
  > What is the self-hosting story I wonder? Fully supported, we have a guide for every popular platform [1]. > If we have our own Postgres db (placed in a specific region for compliance), and we put gel onto our k8s cluster as they state in their docs, does it work well? If you're OK with managing Postgres and your own k8s you won't have a problem. > I assume this type of deployment is free right? Yes, and everything you need for that is Apache 2. > What features are we missing from their cloud offering? A couple: 1. Slow query log: it requires a custom C extension for Postgres (we wish it did not). It's part of Gel and is open source, but it's not allowed to deploy custom Postgres extensions, say, on AWS Aurora. 2. Integrations with Vercel [2] and GH. With our Cloud you get Vecvel Previews set up out of the box. 3. Convenience: we manage Gel Cloud and it's our headache to keep it running for you. :) > Can you configure which region your data is in? We're currently on AWS, but yes, you can configure a region, if you choose to use our cloud. > Couldn’t really find that info in the docs / pricing pages. Good point, I'll use this question as a template to add a Q&A there :) [1] https://docs.geldata.com/resources/guides/deployment https://docs.geldata.com/resources/guides/deployment [2] https://www.geldata.com/blog/seamless-dx-with-vercel https://www.geldata.com/blog/seamless-dx-with-vercel
aitchnyu 2y ago
When will Python get a typesafe query builder? Now there is ``` client.query(''' INSERT User { name := <str>$name, dob := <cal::local_date>$dob } ''', name='Bob', dob=datetime.date(1984, 3, 1)) ``` I'm interested in this and Jetbrains Pycharm and VSCode and CI to catch errors in these. ``` insert(User(name='Bob', dob=datetime.date(1984, 3, 1), children=[User(name='C', dob=datetime.date(2000, 3, 1))]) ```
- 1st1 2y ago
  Probably Python won't get a typesafe query builder until it catches up with its typing to TypeScript. Right now in Python the generics are quite rudimentary, there's no equivalent to TypeScript's keyof or mapped types. We're using all of TS' advanced typing system features to make our query builder work. Python will get a query builder (it's a priority for us now) soon, but it will not be a type safe one. BUT: Python, and all other languages that we support, can use codegen. Just put your query in a `<name>.edgeql` file, and run a special command. Gel will generate a fully typed function that runs that query.
  - aitchnyu 2y ago
    Can we add filters and subqueries to query, like we do with an orm?
the_duke 2y ago
Lesson: if you start a new database company, start with SQL. Almost every DB that starts without SQL support eventually ends up adding it back in later.
- 1st1 2y ago
  True. In our case it's not that simple. By resisting adding SQL early on we were able to advance our data model & schema without SQL holding us back. And now we've added SQL in such a way that it takes full advantage of our stack.
- lmm 2y ago
  That's like saying you should start with microservices/kubernetes/etc. because every company ends up needing those things. IMO you should delay adding SQL as long as possible so that it doesn't compromise your design.
  - ndriscoll 2y ago
    Not using SQL makes it basically a complete non-starter for any business unless it had some extremely compelling niche feature that you absolutely need and can't be found elsewhere. SQL has a massive ecosystem around it. All the examples I see are either some bespoke typescript library, or treat queries as strings. Obviously it can't hook into any of the zillion query builder libraries out there, and you'd have to go implement one or write a decent amount of code for an existing one to be able to use it. I also don't see any docs for JVM usage at all, which is like half the industry. If you want to experiment with syntax for database queries, macros that translate to SQL at compile time seem like a much better way to get traction, but pretty much everything I've seen ends up being a more verbose cosmetic variation of SQL. The one big flaw to fix is that SELECT should have been at the end.
asteroidburger 2y ago
Figured I'd poke at the quickstart a bit, but the github repo linked to from https://docs.geldata.com/learn/quickstart/setup/nextjs https://docs.geldata.com/learn/quickstart/setup/nextjs (https://github.com/geldata/quickstart-nextjs https://github.com/geldata/quickstart-nextjs) appears to be missing.
- 1st1 2y ago
  Fixed. Thank you for reporting this.
  - scns 2y ago
    https://www.geldata.com/roadmap https://www.geldata.com/roadmap Was linked from one of your articles, returns 404 for me.
patatero 2y ago
I've always thought the name EdgeDB is odd since it's not an actual database software and more of a Prisma competitor.
DeathArrow 2y ago
>PostgreSQL seems to be quietly eating the database world. It's not just topping the charts, its adoption momentum is accelerating. Is there something like Vitess for Postgres?
- dvtkrlbs 2y ago
  Neon seems to be doing something similar (their hosted solution was not that great last time I checked) most of their stack is open source.
  - clarkbw 2y ago
    (neon employee) there isn't something like Vitess for Postgres yet but there needs to be. Migrations are painful in general and they become very painful at scale. i haven't used gel yet, i know it manages migrations but i don't know to what extent. most of my experience is with prisma, drizzle, and atlas. neon is working on some plans to solve migrations at scale. we think our custom storage layer will allow us to optimize certain paths, like setting a default value in a new column for a table with millions of rows. this alter command can take a lock on a table for hours. but ultimately we need better tooling. ideally there is a client and a hosted service such that you can use the client to run migrations on your own from the CLI and integrate it into your dev workflow. the hosted service version allows you to push up your schema change from the client to an API. from there you can manage the migration rollout from an operational dashboard that helps you tune resourcing. when i was at github we used vitess to roll out a migration that took 3 weeks to complete. a long time to wait but that's a better tradeoff compared to a migration that takes down production for 6 hours.
    - gulcin 2y ago
      (xata employee) I totally agree with schema migrations being painful, have you seen the open-source tool we developed to tackle this problem? It is called pgroll: https://github.com/xataio/pgroll https://github.com/xataio/pgroll Any feedback is appreciated!
    - dvtkrlbs 2y ago
sgbeal 2y ago
> Arguably, this makes PostgreSQL the only mainsteam database system that is truly open-source. It can't be bought or license-rug-pulled and this creates a kind of trust that can't be emulated in any other way. SQLite, with far more installations than Postgres, isn't a "mainstream database"?
- rswail 2y ago
  >> ... mainstream database system ... > SQLite, with far more installations than Postgres, isn't a "mainstream database"? It's not a system, it's a monolith library, which is why it is used wherever you want a local database with local storage. Postgres implementations are a client/server systems even if the connection is on localhost. It's also MVCC and has RLS and other requirements that do not necessarily apply to a local database like SQLite. It's not about the number of installations, it's the type of database.
sebnun 2y ago
The main reason I'm using Supabase is due to their support of the pgroonga extension out of the box. Does Gel support multilingual full text search?
- 1st1 2y ago
  Yeah, we probably can. We'll research!
jakubmazanec 2y ago
EdgeDB is simply great. Schema, migrations, TypeScript query builder, auth are all awesome features - I love that for my small Remix apps I don't have to create separate API layer, I just use the DB directly. I like the new name (mostly because typing "edgedb" when using the CLI was annoying). Hopefully the new documentation will be better, because the old one wasn't very usable and a little bit sparse.
greg 2y ago
I used EdgeDB 5.0 for a side project, and I loved it. It reminded me of the fun of developing an app with Django or Rails, but serverless with Typescript+React.
patatero 2y ago
Your home page consumes 35% of my GPU, that's crazy. Maybe tone down the background animation a bit?
saturatedfat 2y ago
Would you guys consider adding a llms.txt ?
cstffx 2y ago
[dead]

165 points by mmastrac 2y ago

> To oversimplify, Gel to Postgres is what TypeScript is to JavaScript. I've been using EdgeDB for years (from RethinkDB and MongoDB before that) and it's my favorite database. I don't need to memorize SQL commands and I get a pretty UI to look at my data if my queries introduce issues.

1st1 2y ago
<3

1st1 2y ago

Co-founder here - AMA.

Scramblejams 2y ago
I'm working on some server-side Swift, and it's feeling very promising. Any plans for a Swift client library?
- 1st1 2y ago
  Not in the immediate future, but we have a member in our community who's building something. We'll see if they get near the finishing line.
federalauth 2y ago
Congrats on the rebrand and launch! Biggest reasons to use Gel over Supabase?
- kelthuzad 2y ago
  Just a user here, but I'd say there are many reasons, one of those reasons is in your name: auth. GelDB's auth is versatile and doesn't cost a dime, while Supabase auth is only free up until 50,000 monthly active users, then it costs $0.00325 per MAU (> 100k MAU). I personally just love its query language and the typescript query builder.
- 1st1 2y ago
  Good question. We’re indeed similar products. Gel is somewhat similar to Supabase on the surface—both run on Postgres, both have Auth, and both offer AI features, a CLI, and a UI, among other similarities. However, there’s a big difference beneath the surface: Gel comes with a high-level data model (abstract types, mixins, access policies) that replaces tables and joins. It’s still relational (and we’re about to publish a paper on that), but it’s more high level, strict, and yet more flexible. On top of that, we have a built-in migration system (where schema is a first-class citizen), a performance-tuned network protocol, and a query language called EdgeQL, which is like a child of SQL and GraphQL. These are just a few of our “deep” features. All in all, Gel is a fresh take on day-to-day database development. We cut no corners in trying to push the core database developer experience forward.
atombender 2y ago
Looks like you changed your site and broke current links. For example, searching for EdgeQL gives me this as the first hit: https://docs.edgedb.com/database/edgeql https://docs.edgedb.com/database/edgeql. That redirects to https://docs.geldata.com/database/edgeql https://docs.geldata.com/database/edgeql, which is 404.
- 1st1 2y ago
  Yeah, we'll be repairing this shortly. FWIW we're completely revamping our documentation, it's almost a full rewrite, focused on bringing clarity and logic to the navigation, improving search, etc. We should fully wrap it up in a week or two.
armincerf 2y ago
It says gel is to Postgres what typescript is to JavaScript, so can I add gel to an existing Postgres instance and get the benefits of the nicer query language or does it rely on special tables? If I use some other extension like timescale is that compatible with gel? And is there a story for replication/subscribing to queries for real time updates? Postgres is so powerful partly because of its ecosystem, so I want to know how much of that ecosystem is still useable if I’m using gel on top of Postgres
- 1st1 2y ago
  In the just released new version we've added SQL support, so now you can use SQL taking full advantage of our data model (access policies, mixins, etc) and the network protocol (automatic recovery on network & transaction error, automatic connection pooling on client/sever). We'll continue bridging the gap to make it easier for companies to adopt Gel for an existing database. We either will invest in creating a tool for migration, or maybe some more exciting options we're currently pondering on.
- RedCrowbar 2y ago
  (article author here) > If I use some other extension like timescale is that compatible with gel [...] Postgres is so powerful partly because of its ecosystem, so I want to know how much of that ecosystem is still useable if I’m using gel on top of Postgres Playing nice with the ecosystem is the goal. We started off with more of a walled garden, but with 6.0 a lot of those walls came down with direct SQL support and support for standalone extensions [1]. There is a blog post coming about this specifically tomorrow (I think). > And is there a story for replication Replication/failover works out of the box. > subscribing to queries for real time updates? Working on it. > so can I add gel to an existing Postgres instance and get the benefits of the nicer query language or does it rely on special tables? Gel is built around its schema, so you will need to import your SQL schema. After that you can query things with EdgeQL (or SQL/ORM as before). [1] https://github.com/geldata/gel-postgis https://github.com/geldata/gel-postgis
keruli 2y ago
Was the rebrand really just for simplicity and clarity? It seems like a lot of work to change the name when it was already a pretty established toolchain, not just for your team, but, and this is more important, for your community. I actually think EdgeDB was a far better name. It actually meant something; yes, it wasn't a pure graph database, but it did work with the general concept of graphs and edges. Gel means nothing. Even the domain name: geldata.com makes no sense. You're not selling or creating data, it's a database system/layer. I've been a true evangelist for EdgeDB over the last two years, but this has really irked me - irrationally so, I'm aware(!), but I just can't see the benefits outweighing the drawbacks here. It feels like it has to have been a result of some legal action or something. And just as LLMs were starting to catch up with their knowledge cutoff to include EdgeDB too! Now it'll be another two years until they know what you're talking about again. I know, first world problems. Is the query language name changing, by the way? Or is that still EdgeQL? Please let sanity prevail over at least one thing and don't call it "jel-q-ell"!
- 1st1 2y ago
  EdgeQL stays EdgeQL :) I like that name. I also liked EdgeDB (I'm biased, I coined that name myself). But at every conference we had the same conversation with developers: "EdgeDB? Huh, must be an edge-computing database. Are you running SQLite?" There are other minor reasons for the rename, but this annoyance persisted for a number of years and we decided to pull the plug on it. > I've been a true evangelist for EdgeDB over the last two years Thank you. This means a lot.
  - re-thc 2y ago
    > But at every conference we had the same conversation with developers I wonder if this will really go away or just be replaced with something else. Is it really the name "specifically" or how a lot of people work? (i.e. going by first impressions, connotations, memes, etc) > "EdgeDB? Huh, must be an edge-computing database. Are you running SQLite?" "Gel? Huh, must be for cosmetics. Is this for retail?" p.s. had no issues with EdgeDB.
    - 2y ago
d0100 2y ago
How to deal with eventual slow queries? I currently have a system with complex queries with a lot of joins where I had to create a custom materialized table These queries also deal with permissions & realtime scheduling so endpoint caching doesn't solve it Have gel users hit any performance issues, and how have they dealt with them?
- 1st1 2y ago
  We're shipping a slow query log UI in this version to continuously monitor queries in your system. Our users do get performance issues, usually because they start really using our data model to its full potential, creating tens / hundreds complex access policies, 100-lines long EdgeQL queries etc. We have EXPLAIN command to deal with, and we also support our customers directly helping them understand and fix their system. All of the findings trickle down to the core product so that the rest can benefit too.
plagiarist 2y ago
I was hoping to learn more but many of the docs.geldata.com links on the GitHub page are 404 right now, mentioning just in case nobody has reported that yet.
- 1st1 2y ago
  We'll be fixing them shortly. We're rolling out a new documentation system. Apologies for the inconvenience.
999900000999 2y ago
3 questions. How does this compare to solutions like Supabase. What stands out with Supabase is the sdk support. My current project is probably going to stay on Supabase( it's a hobbyist project regardless), but hypothetically if I was an enterprise prospect how would you pitch your solution. Do you support functions, that I could call from the client for more advanced logic that can't be done with queries ? Why not brand as GelDB. Would probably be easier to Google. Plus it tells me instantly what your selling. PS: Can you offer something like a hobbyist tier for 10$ a month. I don't want to deal with my project randomly shutting off, but I have extremely low requirements in terms of storage during development.
- 1st1 2y ago
  > How does this compare to solutions like Supabase. Supabase is great and works well if you want vanilla (more or less) Postgres with some integrations ready to go. With Gel you get a Postgres with a data layer on top. If you want to have a data model with abstract types & mixins that's easy to work with and scale in complexity, advanced access control, built-in migrations schema engine, hierarchical graph query language on top of SQL, more robust client libraries -- that's Gel. Gel is opinionated and vertically integrated and that's it's core strength. All of its components were developed in tandem -- from the network protocol to client APIs, from the EdgeQL query language to the data model to the migrations engine and so forth. It provides more cohesive experience and can give you non-trivial performance and DX gains if you commit to it. > but hypothetically if I was an enterprise prospect how would you pitch your solution. Total TypeSafety enforced at all levels, built-in migrations engine, best in class access control (we'll be blogging about our access control vs RLS soon.) > Do you support functions, that I could call from the client for more advanced logic that can't be done with queries ? With Gel 6 we'll be announcing the new `net` module tomorrow (spoiler!). You'll be able to schedule HTTP calls from triggers/queries/functions. > Why not brand as GelDB. Would probably be easier to Google. Plus it tells me instantly what your selling. Well, rebranding from Gel to GelDB would be just a text change to the homepage, so hypothetically the door is open for that. But I hope we can make Gel work, just the same way it works for Render/Neon/Fly. > PS: Can you offer something like a hobbyist tier for 10$ a month. Stay tuned, we'll announce some news on that in a couple of days! :)
adsharma 2y ago
How do you reconcile DB schema with strong types vs RPC schema? Have you looked into interop with typespec?
- 1st1 2y ago
  For TypeScript, tRPC mostly just works out of the gate, if I understand the question fully.
xanth 2y ago
Do you have any plans/aspirations in adding Temporal "immutable DB" functionality? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temporal_database https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temporal_database [1] https://github.com/scalegenius/pg_bitemporal/blob/master/docs/bitemporal.md https://github.com/scalegenius/pg_bitemporal/blob/master/doc... [2] https://github.com/ifad/chronomodel https://github.com/ifad/chronomodel
- RedCrowbar 2y ago
  You can use access policies [1] to emulate temporal data. See an example in [2] [1] https://docs.geldata.com/reference/datamodel/access_policies https://docs.geldata.com/reference/datamodel/access_policies [2] https://github.com/geldata/gel/issues/4228#issuecomment-1208496138 https://github.com/geldata/gel/issues/4228#issuecomment-1208...
krashidov 2y ago
If I have an existing postgres db how hard is it to migrate? Can I write regular joins if I need to? Do you have plans or do you already support db branching ?
- 1st1 2y ago
  > If I have an existing postgres db how hard is it to migrate? The main hurdle would to migrate the schema. You'll have to define your schema in Gel (take a look at the reference here [1]) and write a script to copy your data. We are discussing internally how we can simplify this process, this is becoming a popular question. > Can I write regular joins if I need to? You can use EdgeQL and SQL side by side now though one connection in the same function. Gel's schema is still relational (even though it's more powerful with features like multiple inheritance). This page describes the details [2] of how SQL works with our schema (spoiler: it's very straightforward and no different from a hardcoded SQL schema). > Do you have plans or do you already support db branching ? We call Postgres databases "branches" in Gel. And we have tooling around them [3] to have git-like experience with them. Conceptually you can map (manually) your Gel branches to your Git branches if you wish. [1] https://docs.geldata.com/reference/datamodel https://docs.geldata.com/reference/datamodel [2] https://docs.geldata.com/reference/reference/sql_adapter#querying https://docs.geldata.com/reference/reference/sql_adapter#que... [3] https://docs.geldata.com/reference/cli/gel_branch https://docs.geldata.com/reference/cli/gel_branch
  - krashidov 2y ago
    Thank you for the response! This is great info. > The main hurdle would to migrate the schema I'm sure you know this but I know drizzle lets you generate schemas from an existing db. Not sure how applicable that is to Gel. https://orm.drizzle.team/docs/drizzle-kit-pull https://orm.drizzle.team/docs/drizzle-kit-pull > We call Postgres databases "branches" in Gel. And we have tooling around them [3] to have git-like experience with them. Sounds like it's a yes - thanks!

alangou 2y ago

Tried many ORMs to get them to work in SQL, but EdgeDB's was the one that worked extremely straightforwardly, literally without any issues that weren't due to not following the instructions. No bugs, no configuration errors, no nothing. It all just worked. So I think you guys deserve more recognition and credit for what is clearly a very well-engineered product that I intend to use for some of my personal projects.

purplerabbit 2y ago
Have you tried drizzle? If so, what's your beef? (The only one I've had is lack of down-migrations)
- 1st1 2y ago
  Addressing your core question: Drizzle is a great ORM with a tastefully designed API—it's clearly a product of love. But it’s still an ORM, and it’s confined by certain design boundaries that come from being a library. For example, what if you want to use TypeScript, Go, and Python on your backend? Do you run three ORMs, each with different APIs? With Gel, you have one data model and a unified querying layer—the true source of truth. We have a blog post about that and more [1]. --- By the way, if you visit Drizzle’s website, you’ll see that Gel is one of their biggest sponsors. We worked closely with Drizzle to ship a first-class integration with Gel. You can use Gel’s schema and migrations, and Drizzle will just work. You can even use the Drizzle query builder and EdgeQL side by side if you want. [1] https://www.geldata.com/blog/a-solution-to-the-sql-vs-orm-dilemma https://www.geldata.com/blog/a-solution-to-the-sql-vs-orm-di...
  - valenterry 2y ago
    > Do you run three ORMs, each with different APIs? Yes and you absolutely have to. That's not a disadvantage, it's just how it is. Because SQL is the absolute bare minimum. The lowest common standard. And not a great one. Null handling and typesystem for example are way inferior to those of good programming languages. So why would I leave those productivity gains on the table? Using EdgeQL simple means I have another programming language at hand. > EdgeDB has a robust type system that's most [sic] comprehensive that most ORMs Well yeah. And it is inferior to the programming language I use. Hence, this comes at a disadvantage to me. > We've also built a query builder for TypeScript Aha, so then... why not build a query builder for every language, just like with ORMs? Sorry, not convinced. We would be better off by improving on SQL itself.

hiccuphippo 2y ago

Ok, but is it gel as in gif or gel as in gif?

RedCrowbar 2y ago
Gel as in gif obviously! :-)
sieabahlpark 2y ago
[dead]

atombender 2y ago

> PostgreSQL's query planner/optimizer is decidedly state-of-the-art Postgres's cost-based planner is good, but it's a decidedly 1980s design, predating the famous but also outdated Volcano/Cascades systems (used by Microsoft SQL Server and CockroachDB and others). So much has happened in the field of query optimization in the last 30 years, very little of which has ended up in Postgres, I think. Postgres has gotten parallel workers and a JIT, but the fundamental design is largely unchanged. It's also quite conservative about adding improvements; other databases has had some variation of index skip scans for ages (Oracle has probably had it for 20 years now, and you can get it through the TimeScale extension), but Postgres is still working on supporting it natively. The state of the art is arguably Umbra [1], a research project by Thomas Neumann's group at the university of Munich, the successor to HyPer, which is now being commercialized as CedarDB. Their analysis of the Postgres query planner is an interesting read [2]. [1] https://umbra-db.com/ https://umbra-db.com/ [2] https://www.vldb.org/pvldb/vol9/p204-leis.pdf https://www.vldb.org/pvldb/vol9/p204-leis.pdf

paulryanrogers 2y ago
How does MySQL compare? I get the sense that innovations land there sooner because of all the mega corps that use it.
- re-thc 2y ago
  A lot of the work is now part of MySQL Heatwave, the paid Oracle / cloud edition.
- sgarland 2y ago
  MySQL hasn’t had nearly as many innovations. That said, for a long time, it was often faster for simpler queries, and especially range queries, IFF your schema was designed to exploit the fact that it’s a clustering index, so rows are physically located next to the PK. If you’re using UUIDv4 PKs, you’re throwing away its entire advantage, and Postgres will almost certainly be faster. One notable exception for MySQL is INSTANT DDL in 8.x, thanks to contributions from Tencent, which is an extremely nice QoL upgrade that Postgres doesn’t have. The other is logical replication, something Postgres does support now (and has for several years), but didn’t for a long time.

5Qn8mNbc2FNCiVV 2y ago

Just wish the local development story wasn't so bound to a installation or the concept of instances. I just want a compose file in my repositories that starts Postgres and "Gel" separately with the option to execute commands within the container I mean, I don't need it anymore because I did it myself now, but it definitely annoys me that it's not first class

5Qn8mNbc2FNCiVV 2y ago
Btw, I want to start them separately because we deploy a standard HA Postgres cluster and want to rely on proven tooling.
- RedCrowbar 2y ago
  That's already supported, you just need to set the Postgres cluster URI in the `GEL_SERVER_BACKEND_DSN` env var ([1]). [1] https://docs.geldata.com/reference/reference/environment#gel-server-backend-dsn https://docs.geldata.com/reference/reference/environment#gel...
RedCrowbar 2y ago
You can use Docker (and Docker Compose) with Gel for local development [1], but of course you'd miss out on most management features of the CLI, because it's not built to supplant the docker/docker-compose CLI. Are there any particular issues you have currently with the Docker image approach? [1] https://docs.geldata.com/resources/guides/deployment/docker https://docs.geldata.com/resources/guides/deployment/docker

mrbluecoat 2y ago

An odd naming decision from an SEO perspective.

sea-gold 2y ago
Agreed. EdgeDB may not have been representative of the product (or the best name), but at least it was unique.
flessner 2y ago
A great naming decision if you want to make it look like a new product category: sql, redis, s3, gel... Fits right in.

pier25 2y ago

is the pricing per database or per cluster/account?

RedCrowbar 2y ago
Strictly speaking we charge for compute and storage. You can create variously-sized Gel instances and within those instances an arbitrary number of branches.
- pier25 2y ago
  so I can have multiple free dev dbs using 1/4 compute unit?
  - 1st1 2y ago
    We give you 1GB of space for free. I think you can fit three or four branches in that. But we'll announce a cheaper tier this week (spoiler!) with the same amount of disk space.

kelseydh 2y ago

Postgres is great, but the level of work required to scale it on large workloads is really quite overwhelming. You really need expert-level knowledge to scale it. Just ask anybody who has had to shard their database.

genewitch 2y ago
I ran a 4000qps postgres database set to use no more than 640KB of RAM (its in the configs). The DBA was having fun with my silly idea until Slow-Query takes 10 seconds and we flipped back over to the production systems with much more allowed memory for postgres. My purpose was to show that Linux itself is pretty fast at caching and paging, even if Postgres was hamstrung. The db actually ran fine except for the slow queries, and we probably could have cleaned them up, too. But I proved my point. DB was ~300GB, metal had 512GB RAM. This was in 2012.
- dano 2y ago
  Yep. I converted a business from to Postgres in 2004 and never looked back. Stable, reliable, no surprises. Postgres is the answer until proven otherwise.
- sgarland 2y ago
  No offense, but 4000 QPS is not large. I ran a 100K+ QPS MySQL instance with 384 GiB of RAM. This is all subjective, of course, but I wouldn’t call 100K QPS large, either. It’s getting on the high end of what you might reasonably want to handle without horizontal scaling, but it’s still not “large.”
  - genewitch 2y ago
    postgres served 4000qps while restricted to 640 kilobytes of memory.
    - sgarland 2y ago
      I am so sorry; I conflated your comment with the sibling from zeeg.

jackfischer 2y ago

Tight integration with the typescript tool chain has been great for us with edgeql and is about an order of magnitude less error prone than ORMs I've interacted with. Gel is a winning formula especially in the typescript world.

1st1 2y ago
Thank you Jack!

seer 2y ago

What is the self-hosting story I wonder? If we have our own Postgres db (placed in a specific region for compliance), and we put gel onto our k8s cluster as they state in their docs, does it work well? I assume this type of deployment is free right? What features are we missing from their cloud offering? GCP has very cool high availability, backup and monitoring features that I’d hate to loose if we move to their cloud offering. Can you configure which region your data is in? Can you put it behind / inside a VPC? Couldn’t really find that info in the docs / pricing pages.

1st1 2y ago
> What is the self-hosting story I wonder? Fully supported, we have a guide for every popular platform [1]. > If we have our own Postgres db (placed in a specific region for compliance), and we put gel onto our k8s cluster as they state in their docs, does it work well? If you're OK with managing Postgres and your own k8s you won't have a problem. > I assume this type of deployment is free right? Yes, and everything you need for that is Apache 2. > What features are we missing from their cloud offering? A couple: 1. Slow query log: it requires a custom C extension for Postgres (we wish it did not). It's part of Gel and is open source, but it's not allowed to deploy custom Postgres extensions, say, on AWS Aurora. 2. Integrations with Vercel [2] and GH. With our Cloud you get Vecvel Previews set up out of the box. 3. Convenience: we manage Gel Cloud and it's our headache to keep it running for you. :) > Can you configure which region your data is in? We're currently on AWS, but yes, you can configure a region, if you choose to use our cloud. > Couldn’t really find that info in the docs / pricing pages. Good point, I'll use this question as a template to add a Q&A there :) [1] https://docs.geldata.com/resources/guides/deployment https://docs.geldata.com/resources/guides/deployment [2] https://www.geldata.com/blog/seamless-dx-with-vercel https://www.geldata.com/blog/seamless-dx-with-vercel

aitchnyu 2y ago

When will Python get a typesafe query builder? Now there is ``` client.query(''' INSERT User { name := <str>$name, dob := <cal::local_date>$dob } ''', name='Bob', dob=datetime.date(1984, 3, 1)) ``` I'm interested in this and Jetbrains Pycharm and VSCode and CI to catch errors in these. ``` insert(User(name='Bob', dob=datetime.date(1984, 3, 1), children=[User(name='C', dob=datetime.date(2000, 3, 1))]) ```

1st1 2y ago
Probably Python won't get a typesafe query builder until it catches up with its typing to TypeScript. Right now in Python the generics are quite rudimentary, there's no equivalent to TypeScript's keyof or mapped types. We're using all of TS' advanced typing system features to make our query builder work. Python will get a query builder (it's a priority for us now) soon, but it will not be a type safe one. BUT: Python, and all other languages that we support, can use codegen. Just put your query in a `<name>.edgeql` file, and run a special command. Gel will generate a fully typed function that runs that query.
- aitchnyu 2y ago
  Can we add filters and subqueries to query, like we do with an orm?

the_duke 2y ago

Lesson: if you start a new database company, start with SQL. Almost every DB that starts without SQL support eventually ends up adding it back in later.

1st1 2y ago
True. In our case it's not that simple. By resisting adding SQL early on we were able to advance our data model & schema without SQL holding us back. And now we've added SQL in such a way that it takes full advantage of our stack.
lmm 2y ago
That's like saying you should start with microservices/kubernetes/etc. because every company ends up needing those things. IMO you should delay adding SQL as long as possible so that it doesn't compromise your design.
- ndriscoll 2y ago
  Not using SQL makes it basically a complete non-starter for any business unless it had some extremely compelling niche feature that you absolutely need and can't be found elsewhere. SQL has a massive ecosystem around it. All the examples I see are either some bespoke typescript library, or treat queries as strings. Obviously it can't hook into any of the zillion query builder libraries out there, and you'd have to go implement one or write a decent amount of code for an existing one to be able to use it. I also don't see any docs for JVM usage at all, which is like half the industry. If you want to experiment with syntax for database queries, macros that translate to SQL at compile time seem like a much better way to get traction, but pretty much everything I've seen ends up being a more verbose cosmetic variation of SQL. The one big flaw to fix is that SELECT should have been at the end.

asteroidburger 2y ago

Figured I'd poke at the quickstart a bit, but the github repo linked to from https://docs.geldata.com/learn/quickstart/setup/nextjs https://docs.geldata.com/learn/quickstart/setup/nextjs (https://github.com/geldata/quickstart-nextjs https://github.com/geldata/quickstart-nextjs) appears to be missing.

1st1 2y ago
Fixed. Thank you for reporting this.
- scns 2y ago
  https://www.geldata.com/roadmap https://www.geldata.com/roadmap Was linked from one of your articles, returns 404 for me.

patatero 2y ago

I've always thought the name EdgeDB is odd since it's not an actual database software and more of a Prisma competitor.

DeathArrow 2y ago

>PostgreSQL seems to be quietly eating the database world. It's not just topping the charts, its adoption momentum is accelerating. Is there something like Vitess for Postgres?

dvtkrlbs 2y ago
Neon seems to be doing something similar (their hosted solution was not that great last time I checked) most of their stack is open source.
- clarkbw 2y ago
  (neon employee) there isn't something like Vitess for Postgres yet but there needs to be. Migrations are painful in general and they become very painful at scale. i haven't used gel yet, i know it manages migrations but i don't know to what extent. most of my experience is with prisma, drizzle, and atlas. neon is working on some plans to solve migrations at scale. we think our custom storage layer will allow us to optimize certain paths, like setting a default value in a new column for a table with millions of rows. this alter command can take a lock on a table for hours. but ultimately we need better tooling. ideally there is a client and a hosted service such that you can use the client to run migrations on your own from the CLI and integrate it into your dev workflow. the hosted service version allows you to push up your schema change from the client to an API. from there you can manage the migration rollout from an operational dashboard that helps you tune resourcing. when i was at github we used vitess to roll out a migration that took 3 weeks to complete. a long time to wait but that's a better tradeoff compared to a migration that takes down production for 6 hours.
  - gulcin 2y ago
    (xata employee) I totally agree with schema migrations being painful, have you seen the open-source tool we developed to tackle this problem? It is called pgroll: https://github.com/xataio/pgroll https://github.com/xataio/pgroll Any feedback is appreciated!
  - dvtkrlbs 2y ago

sgbeal 2y ago

> Arguably, this makes PostgreSQL the only mainsteam database system that is truly open-source. It can't be bought or license-rug-pulled and this creates a kind of trust that can't be emulated in any other way. SQLite, with far more installations than Postgres, isn't a "mainstream database"?

rswail 2y ago
>> ... mainstream database system ... > SQLite, with far more installations than Postgres, isn't a "mainstream database"? It's not a system, it's a monolith library, which is why it is used wherever you want a local database with local storage. Postgres implementations are a client/server systems even if the connection is on localhost. It's also MVCC and has RLS and other requirements that do not necessarily apply to a local database like SQLite. It's not about the number of installations, it's the type of database.

sebnun 2y ago

The main reason I'm using Supabase is due to their support of the pgroonga extension out of the box. Does Gel support multilingual full text search?

1st1 2y ago
Yeah, we probably can. We'll research!

jakubmazanec 2y ago

EdgeDB is simply great. Schema, migrations, TypeScript query builder, auth are all awesome features - I love that for my small Remix apps I don't have to create separate API layer, I just use the DB directly. I like the new name (mostly because typing "edgedb" when using the CLI was annoying). Hopefully the new documentation will be better, because the old one wasn't very usable and a little bit sparse.

greg 2y ago

I used EdgeDB 5.0 for a side project, and I loved it. It reminded me of the fun of developing an app with Django or Rails, but serverless with Typescript+React.

patatero 2y ago

Your home page consumes 35% of my GPU, that's crazy. Maybe tone down the background animation a bit?

saturatedfat 2y ago

Would you guys consider adding a llms.txt ?

cstffx 2y ago

[dead]