edgedb VS postgres

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?

- Now, the connection between our API servers and the database was slow (a few hundred ms per query), so we moved to self-hosting Postgres which was pretty painful. We tried to use https://github.com/supabase/postgres, but the documentation was very lacking and we had to make a bunch of modifications to get it to work. After we got it working, it was pretty smooth though - pretty easy to implement backups, etc.

I think Supabase generally does good work, but I don't think they can be given credit for pgvector, if that's what you're indicating (I might have misread).

As I understand, Andrew Kane is the principal author of pgvector, and has worked on it for almost two years before Supabase added support for it.

See also https://github.com/pgvector/pgvector/issues/54 and https://github.com/supabase/postgres/pull/472.

we merged the pgvector PR about 2 weeks ago (https://github.com/supabase/postgres/pull/472). If you're missing anything for your CLI don't hesitate to reach out and we'll see if we can integrate it into the product (my email is in my profile)

as an aside, Pinecone looks great

One of the things they recommend is separating the PostgreSQL DB from the rest of the stack. And they also provide an ansible playbook to set up a postgres DB: https://github.com/supabase/postgres/blob/625899e687047a9da658f3f8cc6dd91ac9769694/ansible/playbook.yml

> entire solution from docker

We PR'd this into our docker-compose today [0]. We're always a bit slammed during Launch Week, so if you spot any problems let use know and we'll patch it up asap.

The extension is also deployed directly into our PG bundle [1] which is available in docker [2]

> The Gui for adding roles and tying them to postgres access is very slick with hasura. Is this done manually via SQL commands with supabase?

I haven't tried Hasura so I don't know if this is a direct comparison. pg_graphql works with Postgres Row Level Security - we provide a GUI for this in our Dashboard, but they are also just native PG Policies, so you can write them in raw SQL

[0] https://github.com/supabase/supabase/pull/6138/files#diff-41...

[1] https://github.com/supabase/postgres

[2] https://hub.docker.com/r/supabase/postgres

and can also PR if it's something useful for everyone: https://github.com/supabase/postgres

Show HN: Postgres Docker image with common extensions\ (23 comments)

Hi! I'm one of the contributors to the repo. Just to clarify, our Docker image [0] only contains the latest version of Postgres (13) and the common extensions listed out here [1]. All the other features such as this [2] and this [3] are only available in the AWS EC2 or DO droplet images. We've since updated our README to make that clearer :-)

You can still connect the DB with a PgBouncer image spun up in another container however. Unfortunately, I can't really recommend you which one since there doesn't seem to be an official Docker image for PgBouncer and I myself have never tried any of the existing ones out there. If you're looking to use PostgREST however, they do have an official Docker image that you can use over here [4].

[0]: https://hub.docker.com/r/supabase/postgres

[1]: https://github.com/supabase/postgres#extensions

[2]: https://github.com/supabase/postgres#enhanced-security

[3]: https://github.com/supabase/postgres#additional-goodies

[4]: https://hub.docker.com/r/postgrest/postgrest/