neon VS cockroach

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/.

CockroachDB is an open source distributed SQL database designed for scalability and resilience. While it offers SQL databases, CockroachDB is also compatible with PostgreSQL.

cockroachdb might be close: https://github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach

CockroachDB - SQL

For example, when you create a serverless postgres database with a platform like CockroachDB or Neon, you effectively get a connection string with a strong password. Anyone can connect to your database from anywhere so long as they have the right connection string. There are no security settings in these services to change this behavior.

> Yes you can on the android emulator. The biggest issue is compu arch in that case.

I can also download VirtualBox and run all Windows programs, that would mean that all Windows apps are Linux apps?

> Yes you can for the most part

You can't statically link glibc: https://github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach/issues/3392

glibc can break stuff: https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2022/08/valve-dev-understandab...

I had binaries break because the newer version if openssl was put under a slightly different name.

Also, worth noting, if you're already using PostgreSQL (or plan to) you might want to take a look at https://www.cockroachlabs.com/ they have a free tier too and CockroachDB has a PostgreSQL interface.

I know that some projects like cockroach use custom build tools like bazel. But we actually really like to use to be able to build our projects simply with the great go toolchain and don't really aim to dive deep into custom build solutions.

CockroachDB is designed to be globally distributed. It has to handle causality when resolving collisions. It has to account for having a write operation to arrive after another and still have time priority because it was sent out a few milliseconds earlier.

Cockroachdb created a go runtime patch which measures the Grunning time of a goroutine: https://github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach/pull/82356. It doesn't entirely solve the problem though.

Our entire backend is written in Go. We've built a platform that allows other companies to offer automatic data syncing to their customers' data warehouses. Go works great for building distributed systems like this (see K8s). We're not the only ones in the space building data intensive applications with Go. Pachyderm, Pinecone, Cockroach Labs and are all also doing it. We've been quite happy with how Go has worked for us.