neon VS orioledb

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/.

hey hn, supabase ceo here

we've been fans of Oriole for a while now and have been long-time supporters

in case you're jumping straight to the comments: OrioleDB is a table storage extension for Postgres. it acts as a drop-in replacement for the default postgres storage engine using the Table Access Method APIs (pluggable storage). the storage engine changes the representation of table data on disk. its architecture is designed to take advantage of modern hardware like SSDs and NVRAM. it implements MVCC, the feature that allows allows multiple connected users to see different versions of the data depending on when their transaction started, via an UNDO log rather than tuple versioning.

one caveat: it requires several patches to the postgres core to expand on the type of features external storage engines extensions can implement. for this reason it could be a while before you see this land as a default engine on supabase. we will probably make it available as an option for customers who want to experiment - no timeline is decided yet.

finally, we have been working with the team on decoupled storage and compute [0]. this is experimental but promising, especially with some recent advances in S3 (specifically Express One Zone [1]). we have a demonstration in the blog post.

i'll message Alexander in case there are any technical questions

[0] https://github.com/orioledb/orioledb/blob/main/doc/usage.md#...

[1] https://aws.amazon.com/s3/storage-classes/express-one-zone/

When I saw "cloud native" I was expecting S3-ish the way Neon does it but they say it's experimental: https://github.com/orioledb/orioledb/blob/beta4/doc/usage.md... and for them to say "beta, don't use in production" and then a separate "experimental" label must make it really bad

There are some interesting things in development to potentially solve that problem.

Here's a recent HN submission about OrioleDB of the more promising ones: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36740921

Source code: https://github.com/orioledb/orioledb

https://github.com/orioledb/orioledb/blob/main/doc/arch.md

> - PostgreSQL is very conservative (maybe extremely) conservative about data safety (mostly achieved via fsync-ing at the right times), and that propagates through the IO stack, including SSD firmware, to cause slowdowns

This is why our first goal is to become pure extension. Becoming part of PostgreSQL would require test of time.

> - MVCC is very nice for concurrent access - the Oriole doc doesn't say with what concurrency are the graphs achieved

Good catch. I've added information about VM type and concurrency to the blog post.

> - The title of the Oriole doc and its intro text center about solving VACUUM, which is of course a good goal, but I don't think they show that the "square wave" graphs they achieve for PostgreSQL are really in majority caused by VACUUM. Other benchmarks, like Percona's (https://www.percona.com/blog/evaluating-checkpointing-in-pos...) don't yield this very distinctive square wave pattern.

Yes, it's true. The square patters is because of checkpointing. The reason of improvements here is actually not VACUUM, but modification of relevant indexes only (and row-level WAL, which decreases overall IO).

I took a look at https://github.com/orioledb/orioledb which is a project attempting to remedy some of Postgres' shortcomings, including MVCC. It looks like they're doing something similar to MySQL with a redo log, as well as some other optimizations. So maybe this is the answer.

You don’t need a database written (or rewritten in Rust). we’re working to make Postgres scalable for the next decade too https://github.com/orioledb/orioledb

> I’d love to see B-Tree primary storage option. Aka store the row data inside the primary index.

It is coming: https://github.com/orioledb/orioledb

sorry to underwhelm!

if you like Neon, then I imagine you like their database branching model? On Friday we announced[0] our 500K investment into OrioleDB, who are working on branching[1], with the plan to upstream these changes into Postgres core.

It would be possible for us to run a fork of Postgres today which supports branching, but our long-term view is that developers would prefer a non-forked version of Postgre (to mitigate any risk of lock-in). So we will work on adding branching to Postgres core in the background, which will be a benefit to the entire Postgres ecosystem.

[0] Announcement:https://supabase.com/blog/supabase-series-b#where-were-going

[1] https://github.com/orioledb/orioledb/wiki/Database-branching