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Show HN: Hydra (YC W22) – Serverless Analytics on Postgres

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Re: Show HN: Hydra (YC W22) – Serverless Analytics on Postgres

#11

Post by coatue »

cultofmetatron wrote: post #5
coatue wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[Joe, Hydra cofounder] Hey, that's really great - I love hearing that. Hydra is a columnar database with an integrated Postgres rowstore. Analytics aren't purely best on columnar: we've heard from users that their analytics workload would benefit from fast lookup on row tables too, not just scanning large tables. Our goal for Hydra is to enable realtime analytics on Postgres without requiring an external analytics da…

from what you wrote above, it seems like a great value add for greenfield projects. we currently use aws aurora. how easy would it be to simply sql dump and load into hydra and how well would it serve as a drop in replacement?

Close to a drop-in replacement since Aurora bills itself as Postgres. Any data you load into Hydra will automatically be converted into the columnstore! we're happy to help out and feel free to DM me directly.

Re: Show HN: Hydra (YC W22) – Serverless Analytics on Postgres

#14

Post by switchbak »

coatue wrote: post #7
fourseventy wrote: post #4

The homepage of this website does a bad job of explaining wtf Hydra actually does. Is it a database? Some type of serverless architecture? Ok analytics, but analytics about what, postgrs performance? Does 'analytics' mean that its for OLAP queries?

[Joe Hydra cofounder]. Hydra is a fast analytics db on Postgres. It's a database with both a row and columnstore. Analytics can mean reporting, metrics, customer-facing dashboards. Sounds like we should spend some time making analytics templates.

I've run through the docs and it's really unclear how the compute model works. "Serverless" is nice, but how exactly is that managed?

Re: Show HN: Hydra (YC W22) – Serverless Analytics on Postgres

#15

Post by thawab »

Hello Joe, thanks a lot for hydra and pg_duckdb. I wanted to confirm that for self hosting hydra i have to generate a token from your platform? what data is shared with hydra for this case. We need to double check as our data has restriction of sharing.

> Visit http://platform.hydra.so/token to fetch the access token and paste it into the section above.

Re: Show HN: Hydra (YC W22) – Serverless Analytics on Postgres

#16

Post by thenaturalist »

Hey there, congrats on publicly launching this after your work over the past months!

Having followed the project for a while now, I really scratch my head when looking at your pricing.

The entire innovation of the past decade in database land has gone towards decoupling storage and compute, driving query engines (like DuckDB) and file formats (like Iceberg).

Yet you force-bundle storage and compute in your pricing while also selling a serverless product.

What's the reason behind that?

Why do it in the first place?

How does your pricing work?

The 40/ 500 compute hours I get are included in the spend limit per tier (i.e. max 160 additional hours in Starter etc.) or completely separate?

Why are there member constraints on a database product?

How does that factor into cost/ map to SDL / reasonable team setups of people operating analytics projects revolving around a database like yours?

I have never seen such a limit with any other vendor and esp. when you wanna get a hold in the market/ have people start using Hydra for the specialized role it can provide, having a 2 person limit for the minimum tier if I wanna PoC this would likely be a show stopper tbh...

Re: Show HN: Hydra (YC W22) – Serverless Analytics on Postgres

#17

Post by coatue »

thenaturalist wrote: post #16

Hey there, congrats on publicly launching this after your work over the past months! Having followed the project for a while now, I really scratch my head when looking at your pricing. The entire innovation of the past decade in database land has gone towards decoupling storage and compute, driving query engines (like DuckDB) and file formats (like Iceberg). Yet you force-bundle storage and compute in your pricing wh…

[Joe, Hydra cofounder] Hey there, I appreciate you taking the time to write this up - helps a lot to hear what's confusing.

One of the downsides of serverless is that it can be difficult to predict the overall monthly cost when the granularity of billing (per invocation, memory usage, or execution time) is complex. For developers this might be totally fine (even preferred), but we think that giving a single, predictable price: Hydra $100 / month is better for businesses to plan around.

Usage caps per plan are purely soft limits so users don't actually encounter them. Yes, we want people to upgrade to higher plans. In the words of Maya Angelou "Be careful when a naked person offers you a shirt" - meaning, we believe these are the best prices we can offer today to build a sustainable project on. That said, I appreciate your point about our # of users limit. If we removed that limit would you try out Hydra?

Re: Show HN: Hydra (YC W22) – Serverless Analytics on Postgres

#18

Post by coatue »

thawab wrote: post #15

Hello Joe, thanks a lot for hydra and pg_duckdb. I wanted to confirm that for self hosting hydra i have to generate a token from your platform? what data is shared with hydra for this case. We need to double check as our data has restriction of sharing. > Visit http://platform.hydra.so/token to fetch the access token and paste it into the section above.

Hello thawab, yes! you can self-host Hydra with a token from the platform. Sign-up and visit that URL to take you to the right spot. We call it Bare Metal deployment, here's 1 minute setup guide (https://docs.hydra.so/guides/bare_metal)

Re: Show HN: Hydra (YC W22) – Serverless Analytics on Postgres

#19

Post by thawab »

coatue wrote: post #18
thawab wrote: post #15

Hello Joe, thanks a lot for hydra and pg_duckdb. I wanted to confirm that for self hosting hydra i have to generate a token from your platform? what data is shared with hydra for this case. We need to double check as our data has restriction of sharing. > Visit http://platform.hydra.so/token to fetch the access token and paste it into the section above.

Hello thawab, yes! you can self-host Hydra with a token from the platform. Sign-up and visit that URL to take you to the right spot. We call it Bare Metal deployment, here's 1 minute setup guide ( https://docs.hydra.so/guides/bare_metal )

thanks a lot, the other part of the question:

1- what data is shared with hydra for this case?

2- whats the pricing for the bare metal deployment?

Re: Show HN: Hydra (YC W22) – Serverless Analytics on Postgres

#20

Post by coatue »

thawab wrote: post #19
coatue wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hello thawab, yes! you can self-host Hydra with a token from the platform. Sign-up and visit that URL to take you to the right spot. We call it Bare Metal deployment, here's 1 minute setup guide ( https://docs.hydra.so/guides/bare_metal )

thanks a lot, the other part of the question: 1- what data is shared with hydra for this case? 2- whats the pricing for the bare metal deployment?

billing (usage) metrics so we know what to charge. We offer BYOC 'Bare Metal' deployments as part of the Business plan. You can set it up now, but we offer volume discounts so you should talk to our team directly. Feel free to DM me on X (@JoeSciarrino) or email founders@
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