Citus Alternatives

citus reviews and mentions

• Show HN: Hydra - Open-Source Columnar Postgres
  6 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 19 Sep 2023

  Big congrats on 1.0! Super exciting project.

  My dream scenario would be installing hydra as an extension into my main rails application database. My usecase is showing analytics numbers directly to users, like "how many people visited my listing", which regular row-level postgres is not suited to answer. To do this now we need a to get that data from our DW, which is slow for single queries, so we need a cache, which we need to keep in sync, which is complexity I don't want. It would be amazing if I could do user-facing analytics queries directly in my main app db.

  What put me off after a quick scroll:

  Installing the extension changes the default table type to be columnar. I don't want an installed extension to do that, my main workload is still row oriented oltp, I only want specific tables to be columnar and I don't want to change all my normal migrations to specify `USING heap`. IMO timescale does this really well, it's an extension, not a new database. At least that's how I would want it to be.

  It also seems like you're trying to claim postgres foreign data wrappers as "hydra external tables", implying it's a new feature? Postgres does this (reading other databases and external files) out of the box and it feels sneaky to try and brand that.

  Also the FAQ says "Hydra is not a fork." When the engine clearly is: https://github.com/hydradatabase/citus I realize you want to monetize this as a bigger platform and that's completely fair, but it strikes me as dishonest to deny the citus originins in the FAQ.