neon VS rqlite

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/.

Seems like you could do the same with rqlite [1], since SQLite supports JSON.

[1]: https://rqlite.io

rqlite[1] creator here, happy to answer any questions about rqlite, this latest release, and how it works.

[1] https://rqlite.io

I found simple distributed RQlite https://github.com/rqlite/rqlite based on raft and sqlite. How hard is to add it?

rqlite[1] creator here, happy to answer any questions. rqlite also supports read-only nodes, which can also help with reads at the "edge". It probably wouldn't scale to 100s of nodes, it is an option.

"rqlite supports adding read-only nodes. You can use this feature to add read scalability to the cluster if you need a high volume of reads, or want to distribute copies of the data nearer to clients – but don’t want those nodes counted towards the quorum. These types of nodes are also known as non-voting nodes."

[1] https://rqlite.io/

[2] https://rqlite.io/docs/clustering/read-only-nodes/