neon VS sled

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.

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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/.

a few times, seems interesting. The author's also built a lot of other cool concurrency primitives for Rust as well.

[0] https://github.com/spacejam/sled

- Dropbox [3] uses a similar approach but they talk about it a bit more abstractly.

Sans-IO is more documented in Python [4], but str0m [5] and quinn-proto [6] are the best examples in Rust I’m aware of. Note that sans-IO is orthogonal to deterministic test frameworks, but it composes well with them.

With the disclaimer that my opinions are mine and mine alone, and don’t reflect the company I work at —— I do work at a rust shop that has utilized these techniques on some projects.

TigerBeetle is an amazing example and I’ve looked at it before! They are really the best example of this approach outside of FoundationDB I think.

[0]: https://risingwave.com/blog/deterministic-simulation-a-new-e...

[1]: https://risingwave.com/blog/applying-deterministic-simulatio...

[2]: https://dropbox.tech/infrastructure/-testing-our-new-sync-en...

[3]: https://github.com/spacejam/sled

[4]: https://fractalideas.com/blog/sans-io-when-rubber-meets-road...

[5]: https://github.com/algesten/str0m

[6]: https://docs.rs/quinn-proto/0.10.6/quinn_proto/struct.Connec...

Sled uses bw-tree actually https://github.com/spacejam/sled/wiki/sled-architectural-outlook

There is a valid argument to be made for threads over async in a large percentage of use cases where async is considered the default. If this is what you are referring to however, I don't think they ever referred to async as completely useless: https://github.com/spacejam/sled/issues/1123.

Have you looked into other pure-Rust databases as well, such as sled or GlueSQL which has an SQL interface on top of sled? I wonder how those would compare to Persy.

I'm not sure what you need. Are these of any use? https://github.com/meilisearch/heed https://github.com/spacejam/sled

There is also Sled but as I understand it that is being reworked to use the author's new DB core Marble

There are some databases like sled/FlashDB designed to be embedded to other applications even bare metal microcontrollers. But I do doubt the potential bussiness value of a pure embedded database.

https://github.com/spacejam/sled

To add transaction support, you probably need a good understanding of how the memtable works in Log Structured Merge trees: