edgedb VS neon

A new DB, with a new query language that's like "SQL done right"? This immediately reminded me of EdgeDB: https://edgedb.com/

Is there anyone here who knows enough about these two products to do a compare/contrast?

The whole thing consists of these main parts:

1. SQL parser: https://github.com/edgedb/edgedb/tree/master/edb/pgsql/parse...

>relational no-sql

Do you mean something like edgeDB?[0]

Or do you mean some non-declarative language completely? I don't see the latter making much sense. The issue with SQL for me is the "natural language" which quickly loses all intended readabilty when you have SELECT col1, col2 FROM (SELECT * FROM ... WHERE 1=0 AND ... which is what edgeDB is trying to solve.

[0]https://edgedb.com/

We need to land #3747, then something like this should work

You have to do your own optimiser to avoid, for instance, the N+1 query problem. (Just Google that, plenty of explanations around.) Many GraphQL frameworks have a “naive” subquery implementation that performs N individual subqueries. You either have to override this for each parent/child pairing, or bolt something on the back to delay all the “SELECT * FROM tbl_subquery WHERE id = ?” operations and convert them into one “… WHERE id IN (…)”. Sounds like a great use of your time.

In the end you might think to yourself “why am I doing this, when my SQL database already has query optimisation?”. And it’s a fair question, you are onto it. Try one of those auto-GraphQL things instead. EdgeDB (https://edgedb.com) does it as we speak, runs atop Postgres. Save yourself the enormous effort if you’re only building a GraphQL API for a single RBDMS, and not as a façade for a cluster of microservices and databases and external requests.

Or just nod to your boss and go back to what being a backend developer has always meant: laboriously building by hand completely ad hoc JSON versions of SQL RBDMS schemas, each terribly unhappy in its own way. In no way does doing it manually but presenting GraphQL deviate from this Sisyphean tradition.

I read in the article that NOT having GraphQL exactly match your DB schema is a best practice. My response is “did a backend developer write this?”

Same idea, yeah. Unfortunately, in our case we couldn't use pytest due to complicated test setup, so we used a customized unittest runner instead.

EdgeDB [1] has indeed a rich GraphQL layer, but it's a very different project.

While it also builds on top of Postgres, EdgeDB replaces the entire relational database front-end. EdgeDB features a SQL replacement language called EdgeQL (analytical capabilities of SQL married with deep-fetching in GraphQL), a higher-level data model (tables -> object types), integrated migrations engine, a custom protocol with great performance & great client APIs, and many other things. Read more here [2].

(disclaimer: I'm EdgeDB co-founder)

[1] https://github.com/edgedb/edgedb

[2] https://www.edgedb.com/blog/edgedb-1-0

I'm curious how this squares up with what someone linked elsewhere: https://github.com/edgedb/edgedb/discussions/3403

> EdgeDB does not treat Postgres as a simple standard SQL store. The opposite is true. To realize the full potential of the graph-relational model and EdgeQL efficiently, we must squeeze every last bit of functionality out of PostgreSQL's implementation of SQL and its schema.

This would seem to be an opposing view of how coupled EdgeDB and PostgreSQL are. Which is it?

If you're reading this you probably got a really steep bill from Neon after finding yourself on their "Scale" plan. If you do want to stay with Neon but avoid surprise bills then go to the Plans page and choose what you actually want.

Such is the case with Neon, a serverless Postgres service, that went generally available on April 15. Congrats Nikita Shamgunov and team on the launch. When I saw the announcement, I knew I had to try it out for myself and report back with my findings.

I want to use this as a chance to bring attention to a GitHub issue that I think would help reduce friction for Neon:

https://github.com/neondatabase/neon/issues/4989

If the Neon driver were to allow us to easily pass in a localhost connection, the development and test experience would be easier. Perhaps Neon could swap to something like this internally: https://github.com/porsager/postgres.

Having run a local dev environment connected to Neon and tests connected to Neon got in our way of adoption. We'd prefer to develop and run tests against a regular Postgres localhost database.

To the PMs of Neon, put yourself in the shoes of a new developer thinking of giving Neon a try. What changes will I have to make to my code and my development workflow?

Neon is an open source and cloud-native serverless database platform that focuses on simplicity and ease of use. It supports Postgres databases and offers built-in features like bottomless storage, autoscaling, and branching.

For MySQL, we've got PlanetScale, and for PostgreSQL, there's Neon.

8. https://neon.tech/As you might know not one tool fits all, I still have strong preferences for the following. It helps me get going faster and get things done right first time and helps in ease of maintenance.

Language: Typescript.

Migrated away when they removed the free tier, ended up using https://neon.tech/

Cool! At Neon[0], I work full time on our custom postgres proxy[1]. It's a very nice protocol to work with, although our usecase is quite a bit more complex compared to the ideas presented in the post.

Neon databases scale to zero, so the proxy needs to spin up databases on the fly. The proxy doesn't do that but it knows if the databases is running and asks our control plane to schedule it if it isn't. It's a fun service to maintain.

The biggest pain is error handling. Postgres is really bad for error messages and codes. The only available code we can use is usually protocol violation...

[0]: https://neon.tech/

Neon - PostgreSQL