mvsqlite VS neon

I’ve been using FDB for toy projects for a while. It’s truly rock solid. That being said, I wish there were more layers.

Ideally someone could implement the firestore or dynamodb api on top.

https://github.com/losfair/mvsqlite

For the rough plan, it's Cloud Backed SQLite meets FoundationDB.

- Oh, and if you're wondering about backup to S3, they have that too: https://github.com/libsql/bottomless

- Uh, sqld can integrated with this https://github.com/losfair/mvsqlite, so now your SQLite is backed by FoundationDB!?

- Meanwhile Litestream exists https://github.com/benbjohnson/litestream/

Shameless plug of my [mvSQLite](https://github.com/losfair/mvsqlite) project here! It's basically another distributed SQLite, but with support for everything expected from a proper distributed database: synchronous replication, strictly serializable transactions, + scalable reads and writes w/ multiple concurrent writers.

This project looks really exciting!

I'm working on mvsqlite [1], a distributed SQLite based on FoundationDB. When doing the VFS integration I have always wanted to patch SQLite itself, but didn't because of uncertainty around correctness of the patched version...

A few features on my wishlist:

1. Asynchronous I/O. mvsqlite is currently doing its own prefetch prediction that is not very accurate. I assume higher layers in SQLite have more information that can help with better prediction.

2. Custom page allocator. SQLite internally uses a linked list to manage database pages - this causes contention on any two transactions that both allocate or free pages.

3. Random ROWID, without the `max(int64)` row trick. Sequentially increasing ROWIDs is a primary source of contention, and causes significant INSERT slowdown in my benchmark [2].

[1] https://github.com/losfair/mvsqlite

[2] https://univalence.me/posts/mvsqlite-bench-20220930

That DynamoDB VFS looks cool! I agree that the VFS api makes one think about plenty of crazy ideas. Someone is working on a VFS based on Foundation DB[0] that looks very promising. It was recently discussed here[1]

[0]: https://github.com/losfair/mvsqlite

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32269287

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

For those looking for alternatives check out https://neon.tech/, https://turso.tech/ and https://developers.cloudflare.com/d1/.

Neon is an open-source serverless Postgres offering.