For Postgres: a simpler, scalable connection model.
Ask HN: What could a modern database do that PostgreSQL and MySQL can't
181–190 of 326 posts
Re: Ask HN: What could a modern database do that PostgreSQL and MySQL can't
#182Byzantine Fault Tolerance in distributed systems :)
Re: Ask HN: What could a modern database do that PostgreSQL and MySQL can't
#183easily add a new node in one line command and autorebalance i guess..
Re: Ask HN: What could a modern database do that PostgreSQL and MySQL can't
#184- Blurring (safely!) the line between database and the app using it: transparently switch between bringing data to compute, or compute to data.
- Comprehensive auto tuning: automatic index creation, automatic schema tuning, dynamically switching between column/row-oriented, etc. User specifies SLOs, database does the rest.
- Deeply related to the previous two points: perfect horizontal scalability
- Configurable per-query ACID properties (e.g. delayed indexing)
- All of the above while maintaining complex SQL features like arbitrary joins, large transactions, triggers, etc.
Sure, some of these are in some form in some existing databases. But none offer all of them.
Re: Ask HN: What could a modern database do that PostgreSQL and MySQL can't
#185MongoDB: Stashing unstructured JSON data that you don't really know how you might want to query later. Also, getting up and running with an investor demo ASAP with zero technical fuss, because you have a startup idea but you're broke and can't pay your next month's rent unless you either (A) finish this demo and get that investor money next week, or (B) quit working on your idea and take the Google offer. (Yes, I've…
yup PostgreSQL's JSONB can do this
Re: Ask HN: What could a modern database do that PostgreSQL and MySQL can't
#186Re: Ask HN: What could a modern database do that PostgreSQL and MySQL can't
#187Too 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.
The kind most ones focus? (multi-node, cloud-scalable) are fairly niche.
I live in the enterprise sector where you can get many rdbms living alonside (+ cloud) and I know for a fact "scalability" is close to zero in the list of actual needs.
I don't mean to say scalability is not importan, but is a NICHE: You only need when you truly start to get to certain ceilings.
My customers (a few big companies in my country) consider 10-30 GB rdbms "big". And "slow". Is far far more problems is terrible schema designs (like, actually do everything in their power to make rdbms look bad, and not be that successfully).
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So, my point is that exist far more quality of life to be done at the core/fundamentals before worry much about what to do when I have 100 TB databases across continents...
Re: Ask HN: What could a modern database do that PostgreSQL and MySQL can't
#188Materialize ( https://materialize.com/ ) is capable of performing SQL operations over a stream, using incremental calculation based on differential dataflow. CockroachDB is a distributed SQL database, with strong consistency. I think that Yugabyte is similar. Support for realtime changes, including queries over those changes, is better in other databases, like RethinkDB, OVSDB or Firebase. Relational is not always th…
I really want to do streaming queries over updates and inserts in a normal SQL database. Imagine writing SUBSCRIBE SELECT customers.id, customers.name FROM EVENTS(customer_purchases) AS cpe LEFT OUTER JOIN customers ON cpe.row.customer_id = customers.id WHERE cpe.row.product_id = '123abc' AND cpe.type IN ('update', 'insert') in postgres itself and just getting every incoming purchase for a particular product.
I wonder if Materalize gets you close?
Re: Ask HN: What could a modern database do that PostgreSQL and MySQL can't
#189Subscriptions. 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.
Alas RethinkDB was supposed to do this but the project imploded. It’s been OSSed I think though.
Re: Ask HN: What could a modern database do that PostgreSQL and MySQL can't
#190Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 poi…
> 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. You can use CRDT's to give a formally correct semantics to these "inconsistent" scenarios. And they might well be something that's best explored in a not-purely-relational model, since the way they work is pretty unique and hard to square…
CRDT is just a fancy term for the strategy that still has to eventually merge data. In case of CRDT the data organized / designed in a way that makes it easier. The keyword here is "merging" which by definition kills "infinite" scalability.
You can dance around all you want but you just can't beat laws of nature.
Sure you can always design something that works for your particular case but generic solution is not possible.