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Show HN: Cloud-Ready Postgres MCP Server

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Re: Show HN: Cloud-Ready Postgres MCP Server

#31

Post by spennant »

1zael wrote: post #4

This is wild. Our company has like 10 data scientists writing SQL queries on our DB for business questions. I can deploy pg-mcp for my organization so everyone can use Claude to answer whatever is on their mind? (e.x."show me the top 5 customers by total sales") sidenote: I'm scared of what's going to happen to those roles!

It won’t be that easy. First off, most databases in the wild are not well documented. LLMs benefit from context, and if your tables/columns have non-intuitive or non-descriptive names, the SQL may not even work. Second, you might benefit from an LLM fine-tuned on writing code and/or an intelligent Agent that checks for relevancy and ambiguity in user input prior to attempting to answer the question. It would also help if the agent executed the query to see how it answered the user’s question. In other words “reasoning”… pg-mcp simply exposes the required context for Agents to do that kind of reasoning.

Re: Show HN: Cloud-Ready Postgres MCP Server

#33

Post by spennant »

rubslopes wrote: post #25
fulafel wrote: post #16

From docker-compose ports: - "8000:8000" This will cause Docker to expose this to the internet and even helpfully configure an allow rule to the host firewall, at least on Linux.

Good catch. OP, exposing your application without authentication is a serious security risk! Quick anecdote: Last week, I ran a Redis container on a VPS with an exposed port and no password (rookie mistake). Within 24 hours, the logs revealed someone attempting to make my Redis instance a slave to theirs! The IP traced back to Tencent, the Chinese tech giant... Really weird. Fortunately, there was nothing valuable st…

I made a few assumptions about the actual deployer and their environment that I shouldn’t have… I’ll need to address this. Thanks!

Re: Show HN: Cloud-Ready Postgres MCP Server

#34

Post by runako »

saberience wrote: post #27

Just for everyone here, the code for "building an MCP server", is importing the standard MCP package for Typescript, Python, etc, then writing as little as 10 lines of code to define something is an MCP tool. Basically, it's not rocket science. I also built MCP servers for Mysql, Twilio, Polars, etc.

From HN guidelines:

> Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.

We are hackers here. Building is good. Sharing is good. All this is true even if you personally know how to do what is being shared, and it is easy for you. I promise you there are people who encounter every sharing post here and do not think what is posted is easy.

Re: Show HN: Cloud-Ready Postgres MCP Server

#35

Post by runako »

saberience wrote: post #28
runako wrote: post #2

I'm still trying to grok MCP, would be awesome if you could include usage examples in the doc. Good luck!

It's not complicated at all. All it does is expose methods as a "tool" which is then brought back to your LLM and defined with its name, description and input parameters. E.g. Name: "MySqlTool", Description: "Allows arbitrary MySQL queries to the XYZ database", Parameters: "string: sqlToExecute" The MCP Client (e.g. Claude Desktop, Claude Code), is configured to talk to an MCP server via stdio or sse, and calls a met…

I think people who have been building with LLMs have a different view on what is complicated vs not :-)

It may be easy for you to configure, but you dropped some acronyms in there that I would have to look up. I have definitely not personally set up anything like this.

Re: Show HN: Cloud-Ready Postgres MCP Server

#36

Post by pclmulqdq »

flappyeagle wrote: post #29
moltar wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are LLM SQL benchmarks. [1] And state of the art solution is still only at 77% accuracy. Would you trust that? [1] https://bird-bench.github.io/

Yes. Ask it to do it 10 times and pick the right answer

That only works if you assume the fail cases are uncorrected. Spoiler alert: they are not.

Re: Show HN: Cloud-Ready Postgres MCP Server

#37

Post by sshine »

a-dub wrote: post #13
1zael wrote: post #4

This is wild. Our company has like 10 data scientists writing SQL queries on our DB for business questions. I can deploy pg-mcp for my organization so everyone can use Claude to answer whatever is on their mind? (e.x."show me the top 5 customers by total sales") sidenote: I'm scared of what's going to happen to those roles!

is that true? i'd like that, but i get the sense that this mcp stuff is more oriented around programming assistant and agent applications. i suppose the desktop app can use it, but how good is it for this general purpose "chat with the database for lightweight analytics" use cases is it worth the trouble of dealing with some electron app to make it work?

> i get the sense that this mcp stuff is more oriented around programming assistant and agent applications

Agents will become ubiquitous parts of the user interface that is currently the chat.

So if you bother with a website or an electron app now, MCP will just add more capabilities to what you can control using agents.

Re: Show HN: Cloud-Ready Postgres MCP Server

#38

Post by pclmulqdq »

otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #9
1zael wrote: post #4

This is wild. Our company has like 10 data scientists writing SQL queries on our DB for business questions. I can deploy pg-mcp for my organization so everyone can use Claude to answer whatever is on their mind? (e.x."show me the top 5 customers by total sales") sidenote: I'm scared of what's going to happen to those roles!

Probably nothing. "Expose the database to the pointy-haired boss directly, as a service" is an idea as old a computing itself. Even SQL itself was originally an iteration of that idea. Every BI system (including PowerBI and Tableau) were supposed to be that. It doesn't work because the PHB doesn't have the domain knowledge and doesn't know which questions to ask. (No, it's never as simple as group-by and top-5.)

A family friend maintains a SQL database of her knitting projects that she does as a hobby. The PHB can easily learn SQL if they want.

Re: Show HN: Cloud-Ready Postgres MCP Server

#39

Post by nickdichev »

spennant wrote: post #31
1zael wrote: post #4

This is wild. Our company has like 10 data scientists writing SQL queries on our DB for business questions. I can deploy pg-mcp for my organization so everyone can use Claude to answer whatever is on their mind? (e.x."show me the top 5 customers by total sales") sidenote: I'm scared of what's going to happen to those roles!

It won’t be that easy. First off, most databases in the wild are not well documented. LLMs benefit from context, and if your tables/columns have non-intuitive or non-descriptive names, the SQL may not even work. Second, you might benefit from an LLM fine-tuned on writing code and/or an intelligent Agent that checks for relevancy and ambiguity in user input prior to attempting to answer the question. It would also hel…

The COMMENT command will finally be useful :)

Re: Show HN: Cloud-Ready Postgres MCP Server

#40

Post by bavell »

runako wrote: post #35
saberience wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not complicated at all. All it does is expose methods as a "tool" which is then brought back to your LLM and defined with its name, description and input parameters. E.g. Name: "MySqlTool", Description: "Allows arbitrary MySQL queries to the XYZ database", Parameters: "string: sqlToExecute" The MCP Client (e.g. Claude Desktop, Claude Code), is configured to talk to an MCP server via stdio or sse, and calls a met…

I think people who have been building with LLMs have a different view on what is complicated vs not :-) It may be easy for you to configure, but you dropped some acronyms in there that I would have to look up. I have definitely not personally set up anything like this.

It's basically a simple rpc server, there's nothing complicated going on...
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