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I'm glad that DuckDB has a foundation in place and hope it is resilient enough to push the DB forward when the time comes. Out of all the big orgs, Amazon is p
by hobofan 2mo ago
I'm glad that DuckDB has a foundation in place and hope it is resilient enough to push the DB forward when the time comes.
Out of all the big orgs, Amazon is probably the one that has the least regard for keeping technically interesting projects alive, and the certainly will bulldoze it for some dumb reason when the next re-org comes.
- ferguess_k 2mo agoYup, they are very serious about DynamoDB and it is a very good product. Wish they released more information about it, though.
- felixgallo 2mo agohttps://www.amazon.science/publications/dynamo-amazons-highly-available-key-value-store https://www.amazon.science/publications/dynamo-amazons-highl...
- sargun 2mo agoThis is massively different from DynamoDB.
- ihsw 2mo ago[dead]
- ferguess_k 2mo agoIt is their previous one. I did read another paper about DynamoDB, but still there is not much details. For example, I want to know how to calculate the charge of incremental export. One blog says it is charged by the amount of change logs (but the official doc doesn't say so), which makes sense. But how do I estimate the amount? My hunch is: Put + Write + (1~100) * TransitWrite + Update + Delete + (1~25) * BatchWrite.
- senderista 2mo agoNothing to do with DynamoDB except the name.
- riknos314 2mo agoFor anyone interested in the differences between dynamo (the early internal-only KV store described in this paper) and DynamoDB (The AWS service), Marc Brooker has an excellent writeup https://brooker.co.za/blog/2025/08/15/dynamo-dynamodb-dsql.html https://brooker.co.za/blog/2025/08/15/dynamo-dynamodb-dsql.h...
- ihsw 2mo ago[dead]
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- qaq 2mo agoMan I admire AWS marketing team for convincing people DynamoDB is a very good product. 100 items max per Transaction BatchGet 100 items, 16 MB max low write limits on same key Item size 400 KB max etc.
- nixon_why69 2mo agoThe reason it's good is because, although it is bad, you never have to worry about it in terms of maintenance, admin or scale. It's like lambda for databases. For the same price, you can run a much more capable PSQL instance with way better features, but now you're on the hook for it being up 24/7.
- supriyo-biswas 2mo agoThey should really call it "data-structures as a service" rather than a database, really. Programming against it always reminds me of Leetcode problems, having to define your columns in a way to suit the very specific lookup patterns that they allow for.
- Spivak 2mo agoI mean this reminds me of Firebase v1 and FoundationDB I think both of which have a favorable reputation for quality in both design and implementation. I do think there's something to be said for being forced to code against what operations are actually fast in your DB. Once it works you can be reasonably confident it will also be fast rather than the typical RDBMS experience of getting an abundance of rope with which to hang yourself with. You often won't find out until it's already load bearing that your query doesn't scale.
- LPisGood 2mo agoYou do have to worry about scale with lambda though. It’s not super hard to hit a rate limit where warm up times start being a real problem.
- ferguess_k 2mo agoThanks, I don't really get any chance to seriously use or manage OLTP databases (mostly working with OLAP ones myself) so it is good to know about this. The 400KB limit is indeed very limiting -- I had to truncate some data because of that. I wish I could get a role to work on OLTP databases. PostgreSQL seems to be a fascinating topic so that's on my plate.
- senderista 2mo agoThey have published 2 academic papers about it. What more do you want, operational details?
- ferguess_k 2mo agoFor example, I would like to know how to calculate the charge of incremental export before I run one. One blog says it is charged by the amount of change logs (but the official doc doesn't say so), which makes sense. But how do I estimate the amount? My hunch is: Put + Write + (1~100) * TransitWrite + Update + Delete + (1~25) * BatchWrite.
- senderista 2mo agoUnfortunately that seems like a question for AWS support. I'm not sure they'd be willing to document a formula.
- fullstop 2mo agoSurely they are better than Google in this regard.
- hobofan 2mo agoAFAIK Google is much better at not tearing well-working teams apart in reorgs, and letting people go they have acquihired a few quarters earlier. Of the few examples I have I my head, I'd even say that the fate of a product that has been acquired by Google is probably even better than those of Google's internally developed products. e.g. Waze is still alive and kicking 13 years after acquisition under its own brand and hasn't been completely swallowed by Google Maps. The Nest brand also stuck around for quite some time.
- fwip 2mo agoYoutube is another famous example.
- nixon_why69 2mo agoGoogle is better but it's an incredibly low bar. Amazon will drive these people to quit within a couple years over filling out MBRs and threats about how the MBR isn't good enough (MBR = monthly business report, pure bullshit theatre that drives the whole company mad 2/4 weeks every month). Google would drive them to quit over a longer timeframe, with no threats or harrassment, just because every time they try to ship something cool, someone else has a reason not to do it and that kills you eventually.
- hobofan 2mo ago> Google would drive them to quit over a longer timeframe, with no threats or harrassment, just because every time they try to ship something cool, someone else has a reason not to do it and that kills you eventually. Yeah, I've never personally worked at any of those places, but collaborated on a few open source projects with Googlers and Xooglers and the slow grinding wheels of their "processes" that wear people down over time were very apparent. Nevertheless, it has been a breeding ground for many interesting technologies, even if it often suffocates them over the long term.
- wavemode 2mo ago> Out of all the big orgs, Amazon is probably the one that has the least regard for keeping technically interesting projects alive I'm curious what you mean by this. I would have said the exact opposite - AWS tends to keep projects around for a very long time. They haven't acquired very many open-source projects, but the few that they have are all still running as far as I know.
- hobofan 2mo agoFig, was one of them but was only partially opens source IIRC. CLI autocomplete and script team sync. Turned into/integrated into Amazon Q, which turned into Kiro CLI, which AFAIK doesn't share any functionality with the original product nowadays.
- hugs 2mo agowho currently has the most regard for keeping technically interesting projects alive?
- scotho3 2mo ago<crickets>
- shimman 2mo agoWhat good is a foundation when it's core member is owned by a public corporation? Like we know what happens, the pattern isn't unique or rare. Corporate interests will always take priority over community interests, corporations care about profit not community. If Amazon cares about the community as they care about their own workforce, that does not bode well.
- ChuckMcM 2mo agoI think 'least regard' belongs to Oracle. For some reason I thought DuckDB was one of Gabe's ideas over at DuckDuckGo :-). That said, the acquisition by Amazon is interesting in that it seems to overlap with their existing DB offerings? Which makes me wonder what exactly it is that they are getting out of this.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- Henchman21 2mo agoPotential competitor removed from play
- xyzelement 2mo agoDuckdb is already an aws offering
- re-thc 2mo agoAnd it could have expanded elsewhere?
- jhh 2mo agothey did fairly well with Java
- Grombobulous 2mo agoI could definitely imagine Java in better hands. I can't think of many other languages/frameworks where one of the worst places to install it is from the primary sponsor/maintainer.
- dofm 2mo agoJava could be in better hands. Maybe will be, one day, when Oracle finally ends up fighting the organisational fire that has started in their debt pile.
- shevy-java 2mo ago> Amazon is probably the one that has the least regard for keeping technically interesting projects alive Well ... https://killedbygoogle.com/ https://killedbygoogle.com/ Either way that news is awful. Europeans selling out to US corporations and then wondering why Europe is not competitive in software engineering anymore. Funniest thing is Draghi keeps on saying that; well, recently we also heard that the USA has full access to all national police databases in the EU now. It seems as if Washington remote-proxy-controls the EU. Quite amazing to see, too. The amount of bribe money flowing must be legendary.
- LoganDark 2mo agoI'm still salty about them demolishing Cloud9