neon VS vitess

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

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

With Vitess likely merging a lot of its binaries into a single unified binary: https://github.com/vitessio/vitess/issues/7471#issuecomment-...

... it would be a wild future if Vitess replaced the underlying MySQL engine with this as long as the performance is good enough.

Thank you for the compliment!

We recently started adding support for CTEs in Vitess! You can check out https://github.com/vitessio/vitess/pull/14321 if you want to see some technical details of the implementation.

For now, we have added preliminary support by converting them to derived tables internally, but we believe that we need to make CTEs first-class citizens themselves of query planning. Once we make that change, we can look towards supporting recursive CTEs.

This however will take some time, but then, all good things do!

Why would it be a Google project? https://github.com/vitessio/vitess

This is great news. I strolled around https://github.com/vitessio/vitess/issues/12967.

Are there any public discussions of more trade-offs vitess has to make to enable fks?

MySQL + Vitess I noticed Slack gets by using MySQL because they're using Vites. From Slack's post (https://slack.engineering/scaling-datastores-at-slack-with-vitess/) it seems like they choose Vites because it facilitated a smooth transition because it's built on top of MySQL.

This sounds very similar to the connection pooling done by vitess https://vitess.io/.

https://github.com/vitessio/vitess/issues/12967

A lot of this is possible thanks to the magic of Vitess.

"Vitess is a database clustering system for horizontal scaling of MySQL."

https://github.com/vitessio/vitess