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

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

#31

Post by why-el »

grobbie wrote: post #10

CockroachDB is getting a lot of interest these days. It has broad PGSQL language (and also wire I think) compatibility yet has a clustered peer architecture well suited to running in a dynamic environment like cloud or k8s. Nodes can join dynamically and it can survive them leaving dynamically as long as there's a quorum. Data is distributed across the nodes without administrator needing to make any shard rebalance t…

I don't know if anybody from CockroachDB is reading this but their article[1] on serializable transactions is somewhat questionable, as it compares CockroachDB's Serializable to Postgres's Read Committed, which seems to imply CockroachDB is better. Of course, Postgres has serializable as well. The only novelty in the article is that Cockroach DB runs Serializable by default, so I am not sure what that comparison was doing.

[1] https://www.cockroachlabs.com/docs/stable/demo-serializable....

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

#32

Post by refset »

kweinber wrote: post #12

Automatic versioning of data and CDC (change data capture) broadcast of data deltas to external systems.

> Automatic versioning of data

More specifically, I would argue for the ability to run arbitrarily complex, non-locking, fully-consistent queries against all historic versions of the database, a.k.a. "the database as a value" (also "transaction time" or "system time" temporal queries)

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

#33

Post by mirekrusin »

grobbie wrote: post #10

CockroachDB is getting a lot of interest these days. It has broad PGSQL language (and also wire I think) compatibility yet has a clustered peer architecture well suited to running in a dynamic environment like cloud or k8s. Nodes can join dynamically and it can survive them leaving dynamically as long as there's a quorum. Data is distributed across the nodes without administrator needing to make any shard rebalance t…

It always rubs me the wrong way - all those paxos/raft approaches (which are great, but...) simply elect the leader to pick writes. In that sense there is no distribution of computation at all. It's still single target that has to cruch through updates. Replication is just for reads. Are we going to have something better anytime soon? Like real distribution, when you add more servers writes distribute as well?

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

#34

Post by riku_iki »

mirekrusin wrote: post #33
grobbie wrote: post #10

CockroachDB is getting a lot of interest these days. It has broad PGSQL language (and also wire I think) compatibility yet has a clustered peer architecture well suited to running in a dynamic environment like cloud or k8s. Nodes can join dynamically and it can survive them leaving dynamically as long as there's a quorum. Data is distributed across the nodes without administrator needing to make any shard rebalance t…

It always rubs me the wrong way - all those paxos/raft approaches (which are great, but...) simply elect the leader to pick writes. In that sense there is no distribution of computation at all. It's still single target that has to cruch through updates. Replication is just for reads. Are we going to have something better anytime soon? Like real distribution, when you add more servers writes distribute as well?

data is also sharded in those databases

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

#35

Post by nicoburns »

Subscriptions. Databases like Firebase will automatically push changes to query results down to clients. You can add this to Postgres with tools like Hasura, but it's poll based and not very efficient. It's a super-useful feature for keeping UIs in sync with database state.

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

#36

Post by mirekrusin »

riku_iki wrote: post #34
mirekrusin wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It always rubs me the wrong way - all those paxos/raft approaches (which are great, but...) simply elect the leader to pick writes. In that sense there is no distribution of computation at all. It's still single target that has to cruch through updates. Replication is just for reads. Are we going to have something better anytime soon? Like real distribution, when you add more servers writes distribute as well?

data is also sharded in those databases

true, thanks for pointing out, but this is a bit cheating isn't it? ie. atomic transactions cross shards flip over, right? it's basically ergonomic equivalent of just using multiple databases?

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

#37

Post by gk1 »

svcrunch wrote: post #5

Support for vector indexes and vector similarity queries (dense, and sparse-dense). I believe PostgreSQL and MySQL will support this within a few years.

In the meantime there’s Pinecone (https://www.pinecone.io) to put alongside your DB.

Also there is at least one plugin for Postgres that I know of, PGVector, but no idea how it performs.

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