Live data from Hacker News

Amazon Aurora DSQL

aws.amazon.com

41–50 of 146 posts

Re: Amazon Aurora DSQL

#41

I find it to be super limited, and I'm sort of struggling to see the point given all these constraints. No temporary tables, no foreign keys, no views, no more than 10k rows in a transaction. Except for some basic wire compatibility with the postgres protocol, I'd hardly call this a "database", and more a key-value store. https://docs.aws.amazon.com/aurora-dsql/latest/userguide/wor...

> Except for some basic wire compatibility with the postgres protocol, I'd hardly call this a "database", and more a key-value store. Hopefully that keeps the pricing reasonable. :) But seriously, for a smaller CRUD app, this could be sufficient, even "magical," if the price is right. For my part though, the lack of multiple databases per cluster puts multi-tenant systems completely off the table. Now that you mentio…

But a smaller CRUD app wouldn't need "virtually unlimited scale". I'm very curious what their target audience is.

Re: Amazon Aurora DSQL

#42
post #8

So does it scale to zero, and scale from zero with AWS' recent "serverless" products, Aurora Serverless v2 and MSK Serverless for example, had been very misleading with "serverless" title. I hope it is not a lie this time.

There's nothing in the cluster api to control scale or set instance type so this does look actually serverless for a nice change!

Re: Amazon Aurora DSQL

#43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Except for some basic wire compatibility with the postgres protocol, I'd hardly call this a "database", and more a key-value store. Hopefully that keeps the pricing reasonable. :) But seriously, for a smaller CRUD app, this could be sufficient, even "magical," if the price is right. For my part though, the lack of multiple databases per cluster puts multi-tenant systems completely off the table. Now that you mentio…

>the lack of multiple databases per cluster I don't think that will matter. This feels much more like DynamoDB where you're charged for GB used/stored and no infra cost, so no reason to nest databases

Isolation can be quite important. I work with a micro services architecture, where we assign a database per service.

That makes it very easy to manage access to sensitive data.

Re: Amazon Aurora DSQL

#44
The fact that it uses "Firecracker microVMs" and a few other things makes me think this is an S3-backed Lambda-based database that emulates Postgres on the wire.

Especially when you consider the recent feature additions to S3.

Re: Amazon Aurora DSQL

#45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Except for some basic wire compatibility with the postgres protocol, I'd hardly call this a "database", and more a key-value store. Hopefully that keeps the pricing reasonable. :) But seriously, for a smaller CRUD app, this could be sufficient, even "magical," if the price is right. For my part though, the lack of multiple databases per cluster puts multi-tenant systems completely off the table. Now that you mentio…

But a smaller CRUD app wouldn't need "virtually unlimited scale". I'm very curious what their target audience is.

I don't know, I manage a PHP app with about 10K users. If it doesn't cost much more, just paying to have the peace of mind that I never need to think about it again as my app grows, would not be a bad trade. This is assuming, of course, that the price is not extortionate.

Re: Amazon Aurora DSQL

#46

I am confused, what is the difference between Aurora DSQL and Aurora Serverless? https://aws.amazon.com/rds/aurora/serverless/

Aurora is the postgres binary running with patches to write to their storage backend.

This appears wire-compatible with postgres but does things differently like locking.

Depends a lot on how you use postgres as to whether its drop-in compatible or not.

Re: Amazon Aurora DSQL

#47
post #44

The fact that it uses "Firecracker microVMs" and a few other things makes me think this is an S3-backed Lambda-based database that emulates Postgres on the wire. Especially when you consider the recent feature additions to S3.

[deleted]

Re: Amazon Aurora DSQL

#48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>the lack of multiple databases per cluster I don't think that will matter. This feels much more like DynamoDB where you're charged for GB used/stored and no infra cost, so no reason to nest databases

Isolation can be quite important. I work with a micro services architecture, where we assign a database per service. That makes it very easy to manage access to sensitive data.

You do not need logical database isolation if you have even stronger isolation with virtual clusters. The pricing and quota will be important factor for that use case.

Re: Amazon Aurora DSQL

#49
post #2

> Amazon Aurora DSQL is a serverless distributed SQL database with virtually unlimited scale, the highest availability, and zero infrastructure management. I will ignore their claimed almost unlimited scalability (which I somewhat believe as it's in their best interest to make it expensive fast), and "highest" (as compared to what?) availability. But my pet peeve is zero infrastructure management . This is blatantly…

> I will ignore their claimed almost unlimited scalability (which I somewhat believe as it's in their best interest to make it expensive fast)

I would believe it can scale your cost easily, but I'd be surprised if it can scale well in terms of capability. How many million QPS is "virtually unlimited scale"? The 10k row transaction limit and no FKs (or even views???) also just make this thing sound completely non-serious.

Re: Amazon Aurora DSQL

#50

Postgres compatibility depends a bit on what you rely on. This doesn't appear to be postgres under the hood, more wire-compatible. >Aurora DSQL is PostgreSQL compatible, which means that it provides identical behavior for most supported features, identical query results for all SQL features, and supports many popular PostgreSQL drivers and tools with minor configuration changes. Supported SQL expressions return ident…

https://aws.amazon.com/rds/aurora/dsql/faqs/ - it is free for preview
Post reply on HN