Ask HN: What could a modern database do that PostgreSQL and MySQL can't

1. Hasura

   1 236 31,673 9.9 TypeScript

   Blazing fast, instant realtime GraphQL APIs on all your data with fine grained access control, also trigger webhooks on database events.

   

   Hasura evaluated Postgres' listen/notify feature to power their subscriptions, but chose polling instead:

   https://github.com/hasura/graphql-engine/blob/master/archite...

   > Listen/Notify: Requires instrumenting all tables with triggers, events consumed by consumer (the web-server) might be dropped in case of the consumer restarting or a network disruption.

   It was substantially non-trivial for them to implement subscriptions that were both robust and efficient using this approach. I'd like to see more DBs bake that feature in, like RethinkDB did.

2. Sevalla

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3. realtime

   2 61 7,259 9.5 Elixir

   Broadcast, Presence, and Postgres Changes via WebSockets

   

   The Superbase (https://github.com/supabase/realtime) approach is really interesting. It listens to the logical replication stream. Makes a lot of sense to me. Unfortunately our postgres instances hosted on heroku don't expose this, so I've been unable to try it out.

4. yugabyte-db

   3 98 9,721 10.0 C

   YugabyteDB - the cloud native distributed SQL database for mission-critical applications.

   

   May I suggest looking at YugabyteDB, which is a distributed SQL database built on actual PostgreSQL 11.2 engine? It's way ahead of CockroachDB in terms of feature support.

   YugabyteDB has UDFs, stored procedures, distributed transactions, the range types are working from what I can tell, at least the example from here: https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Extract_days_from_range_typ... works right out of the box, just copy paste.

   YugabyteBD == Postgres. The query planner, analyzer and executor are all Postgres. Mind you, some features are not readily available because handling them properly in a distributed manner takes effort. Those unsupported features are disabled on the grammar level, before being worked on. But - unsupported features will not corrupt your data. Missing features are enabled very fast.

   For example, I have recently contributed foreign data wrapper support: https://github.com/yugabyte/yugabyte-db/pull/9650 (enables postgres_fdw at a usable level) and working on table inheritance now.

   Yugabyte is an amazing bit of technology and more people should know about it. By the way - it's Apache 2 with no strings attached.

5. TablaM

   4 158 209 0.0 Rust

   The practical relational programing language for data-oriented applications

   

6. sqlite3vfshttp

   5 5 207 1.8 Go

   Go sqlite3 http vfs: query sqlite databases over http with range headers

   

   There's a bunch of projects that have implemented this. I wrote a SQLite VFS in Go that lets you query a read-only SQLite db over http (including from s3) [0].

   The VFS API offers the possibility for weirder storage solutions, if thats the type of thing you're into. Recently I've been moving some of my personal websites hosted on AWS Lambda over to use a read/write sqlite db backed by DynamoDB[1]. There are a bunch of limitations to this type of thing (like it uses a global write lock), but it works nicely for DBs that have low write frequency.

   [0]: https://github.com/psanford/sqlite3vfshttp

   [1]: https://github.com/psanford/donutdb

7. donutdb

   6 4 186 5.3 Go

   Store and query a sqlite db directly backed by DynamoDB.

   

   There's a bunch of projects that have implemented this. I wrote a SQLite VFS in Go that lets you query a read-only SQLite db over http (including from s3) [0].

   The VFS API offers the possibility for weirder storage solutions, if thats the type of thing you're into. Recently I've been moving some of my personal websites hosted on AWS Lambda over to use a read/write sqlite db backed by DynamoDB[1]. There are a bunch of limitations to this type of thing (like it uses a global write lock), but it works nicely for DBs that have low write frequency.

   [0]: https://github.com/psanford/sqlite3vfshttp

   [1]: https://github.com/psanford/donutdb

8. meteor-mysql

   7 2 36 4.6 JavaScript

   Reactive MySQL for Meteor

   

   I'm the defacto maintainer of the Meteor MySQL integration and the Node.js package mysql-live-select.

   These implement pub/sub and reactive queries using the MySQL binary log as the event source:

   https://github.com/vlasky/meteor-mysql

9. InfluxDB

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   InfluxDB – Built for High-Performance Time Series Workloads. InfluxDB 3 OSS is now GA. Transform, enrich, and act on time series data directly in the database. Automate critical tasks and eliminate the need to move data externally. Download now.

   

10. mysql-live-select

    8 2 3 2.1 JavaScript

    NPM Package to provide events on updated MySQL SELECT result sets (by vlasky)

    

11. list-of-tech-migrations

    9 15 553 5.3

    list of public tech migrations

    

12. absurd-sql

    10 25 4,277 2.5 JavaScript

    sqlite3 in ur indexeddb (hopefully a better backend soon)

    

13. lovefield

    11 6 6,839 0.0 JavaScript

    Discontinued Lovefield is a relational database for web apps. Written in JavaScript, works cross-browser. Provides SQL-like APIs that are fast, safe, and easy to use.

    

14. stolon

    12 9 4,744 0.9 Go

    PostgreSQL cloud native High Availability and more.

    

15. citus

    13 73 11,754 9.3 C

    Distributed PostgreSQL as an extension

    

    Maybe I'm reading it wrong, but that looks like yet another multi-master high-availability system, which is also an important property for a system to have but more or less unrelated tow hat I was talking about.

    As far as open-source add-ons for true horizontal scaling, I think [Citus](https://github.com/citusdata/citus) is the most well-known and sophisticated, but I don't have enough experience with it in production to have a particularly strong opinion yet. It might work quite well, but I still fundamentally doubt that it will ever be as good as a system that was designed to support horizontal sharding from the ground up.

16. dolt

    14 99 19,023 10.0 Go

    Dolt – Git for Data

    

    You should check out dolt, does exactly what you're describing, and is a drop-in MySQL replacement:

    https://github.com/dolthub/dolt

17. SaaSHub

    www.saashub.com featured

    SaaSHub - Software Alternatives and Reviews. SaaSHub helps you find the best software and product alternatives

    

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