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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

#101

Post by tlack »

zinclozenge wrote: post #22

1. Automatic backups to an S3 compatible storage, out of the box. 2. Progressive automatic scalability. As load increases or storage runs out, the DB should be able to automatically. NewSQL databases do this already. 3. Tiered storage. 4. Support streaming, stream processing, in memory data structures, etc. I feel like this is one of those weird things but I keep wishing this were possible when I work on side project…

Great list. For #4, you should take a look at Erlang or Elixir - they have "just enough" concurrency with streaming primitives and a functional style that makes it easy to use. They make a lot of "bolt on" stuff you need for a regular startup (Redis, Celery, etc) superfluous.

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

#102

Post by threeseed »

mamcx wrote: post #54

Too much focus in the "scalability" that only matter for a very narrow niche and lateral to the DB engine, so I instead focus in real progress/improvements for RDBMS (one of my dreams is doing this): - Algebraic data types, removal of NULLs. - Including a relational language, not just a partial query language (SQL). (I making one at https://tablam.org , just to get the idea) - So, is full relational (you can store ta…

Scalability and high availability are not niche.

Everyone wants this and most production environments need it.

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

#103

Post by ww520 »

What is modern? If we think how databases run better in the modern hardware, the trend goes toward plenty of RAM and fast disk (SSD/memory-disk) that doesn't have the disk seek problem of the old days. Modern databases being developed today aim for those environment.

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

#104

Post by bogomipz »

someelephant wrote: post #88
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…

Make sure you thoroughly test your multi-region deploys. Last time we tried the system was not stable when a region went down. Also beware of this anti pattern: https://www.cockroachlabs.com/docs/stable/topology-patterns....

Interesting. So you followed the advice of deploying to greater than two regions and your DB didn't survive when you lost a region or you only deployed to two and got bit by the anti-pattern?

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

#105

Post by tmh88j »

kixiQu wrote: post #100
masa331 wrote: post #66

This title kind of implies that PG or MySQL aren't modern or modern enough which i think is is very wrong. Look what they bring in every update. I think they are quite modern!

The title seems fair to me. Anything that's actually used has certain commitments it made earlier in its lifecycle from which it now can't deviate, even if later developments made the commitments problematic.

>Anything that's actually used has certain commitments it made earlier in its lifecycle from which it now can't deviate

Perhaps I'm misunderstanding your comment, but MySQL has definitely deprecated and removed features over the years. https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/8.0/en/mysql-nutshell.html

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

#106

Post by jffry »

kixiQu wrote: post #100
masa331 wrote: post #66

This title kind of implies that PG or MySQL aren't modern or modern enough which i think is is very wrong. Look what they bring in every update. I think they are quite modern!

The title seems fair to me. Anything that's actually used has certain commitments it made earlier in its lifecycle from which it now can't deviate, even if later developments made the commitments problematic.

I think it's unfair. "Modern" is in no way equivalent to what the thread is really asking, which is what could you do if you built a new database today with all of the knowledge but none of the existing commitments of a large mainstream database.

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

#107

Post by laurencerowe »

More from a document database rather than an OLTP standpoint, but working with JSON data in Postgres I'd really like to see:

* Exclusion Constraints support for GIN indexes (which supports Arrays and JSONB.) This would allow unique keys on array elements without having to use triggers to put the individual array elements in another table.

* Array element foreign keys, which I think is a subset of the Inclusion Constraints proposal (which would additionally allow constraints into ranges.)

* A faster procedural language. While plv8 is an improvement over plpgsql, it still seems substantially slower than running the equivalent in a separate NodeJS process. (Possibly just build issues for me.)

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

#108

Post by FpUser »

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?

You are asking for a miracle or just simply - breach of the physics laws. The only way to horizontally scale write speed is to shard your data to be written somehow. You can easily do it but then your reading queries have to go to multiple servers to assemble single result. You can't scale both at the same time. There are some in between solutions like eventual read consistency that are relying on traffic at some point easing enough so that the conductor can actually synchronize servers. But if you have a steady stream of read/write requests the only way you really can scale is to tell amazon to sod off, buy yourself big fat multicore / multi CPU server with nice SSD array (preferably of Optane type) and watch your processing power suddenly shoot through the roof while the cost greatly decreases ;)

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

#109

Post by Chyzwar »

1. High performance read/write of Scylla/Cassandra with high availability[1]. It has some limitations for OLTP workloads and require careful planning. Postgres without Citus is not really HA and even then companies would often invent custom sharding/cluster management system.

2. Powerful graph query language like Cypher. It might not perform well in real life, but my personal experience left me amazed[2]. There is a number of issues with SQL that could be addressed[3], but current standard is way too much prevalent.

3. Zero impedance mismatch between database and application representation. In database like Smalltalk GemStone it is really seamless experience for developer to write database code and application code[4]. To some extent, MongoDB success can be attributed to this aspect.

4. Datomic temporal capabilities[5]. It is hard to maintain temporal tables in postgres. There are some use cases where you really want query in point of time. Strictly not an OLTP feature, but I can see this be usefully in many scenarios.

  [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fo1dPRqbF-Q
  [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMjwgKqMzi8&t=726s
  [3] https://www.edgedb.com/blog/we-can-do-better-than-sql
  [4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EyBkLbNlzbM
  [5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7lm3K8zVOdY
Edited: independence -> impedance

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

#110

Post by ramchip »

alberth wrote: post #65
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…

Sounds like Mnesia, which has existed for 20+ years. https://erlang.org/doc/man/mnesia.html

Mnesia isn't SQL-compatible, can't scale horizontally (each node has a full copy of the DB + writes hit all nodes), needs external intervention to recover from netsplits, and expects a static cluster.

It's pretty much the opposite of what the parent described IMHO. It's meant more like a configuration store than a proper DB. That's how RabbitMQ uses it for instance, it stores metadata in Mnesia and messages in a separate store, but they're working on replacing Mnesia with their own more modern store based on Raft.

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