Amazon Aurora DSQL • Hacker News Board

Re: Amazon Aurora DSQL

#51

Post by karmakaze » Tue, Dec 03, 2024, 7:30 PM UTC

Edwinr95 wrote: post #36

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...

Despite this number of limitations, I imagine that it's still far more usable from an application than DynamoDB for many use-cases. Adding Jsonb support would make it even more competitive for some.

Re: Amazon Aurora DSQL

#52

Post by ajbourg » Tue, Dec 03, 2024, 7:33 PM UTC

Edwinr95 wrote: post #36

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...

Seems like it's mostly AWS' answer to Cloudflare D2, but using Postgres as the frame of reference instead of sqlite. (I'm not really sure what to call Postgres in this situation since it's so limited it's clearly not any full version of Postgres in any respect. Postgres-ish)

Re: Amazon Aurora DSQL

#53

Post by acedTrex » Tue, Dec 03, 2024, 7:46 PM UTC

e1g wrote: post #34

Just tried a quick test cluster - Identifies as PG 16.5 No views/triggers/sequences No foreign key constraints No extensions No NOTIFY ("ERROR: Function pg_notify not supported") No nested transactions No json(b) Unsupported PG features are now online https://docs.aws.amazon.com/aurora-dsql/latest/userguide/wor...

I feel like no FKs and no jsonb is really burying the lede there lol

Re: Amazon Aurora DSQL

#54

Post by shayonj » Tue, Dec 03, 2024, 7:52 PM UTC

e1g wrote: post #34

Just tried a quick test cluster - Identifies as PG 16.5 No views/triggers/sequences No foreign key constraints No extensions No NOTIFY ("ERROR: Function pg_notify not supported") No nested transactions No json(b) Unsupported PG features are now online https://docs.aws.amazon.com/aurora-dsql/latest/userguide/wor...

oof! that's rough. I was also not particularly impressed with "limitless". Esp. because you can't have partitions on the postgres limitless offering.

Re: Amazon Aurora DSQL

#55

Post by joshstrange » Tue, Dec 03, 2024, 7:53 PM UTC

I won't even consider this without pricing, I can't imagine how anyone could.

Serverless Aurora is stupid-expensive so I can't imagine this is going to be cheap but I keep hunting for that perfect DB that can scale to 0 (or very low) and be priced well.

Right now neon.tech is what I'm using and I'm very happy but this looks like it would be interesting IF the pricing is good.

Re: Amazon Aurora DSQL

#56

Post by evanelias » Tue, Dec 03, 2024, 7:59 PM UTC

kbumsik wrote: 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.

This was announced only a couple weeks ago, but Aurora Serverless v2 can scale to zero now. https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/database/introducing-scaling-to...

However, the latency scaling from zero is still painful, "up to 15 seconds".

Re: Amazon Aurora DSQL

#57

Post by bobnamob » Tue, Dec 03, 2024, 8:11 PM UTC

Oof, press release proof readers must have been hit by layoffs

> With its innovative active-active distributed architecture, Aurora DSQL is designed for 99.99% availability in single-Region configuration and 99.999% in multi-Region configuration, with an innovative active-active, distributed architecture, making it ideal for building highly-available applications

We get that its architecture is innovative and active-active

Re: Amazon Aurora DSQL

#58

Post by craigkerstiens » Tue, Dec 03, 2024, 8:19 PM UTC

e1g wrote: post #34

Just tried a quick test cluster - Identifies as PG 16.5 No views/triggers/sequences No foreign key constraints No extensions No NOTIFY ("ERROR: Function pg_notify not supported") No nested transactions No json(b) Unsupported PG features are now online https://docs.aws.amazon.com/aurora-dsql/latest/userguide/wor...

It feels very disingenuous to say "Postgres compatible" and have this as a missing feature set. I'm sure they'd quickly argue it's wire compatibility, but even then it's a slippery slope and wire compatible is left open to however the person wants to interpret it.

There is no 'standard' or 'spec' for what makes something Postgres wire compatible.

This feels like a strong overreach on the marketing front to leverage the love people have for Postgres to help boost what they've built. That is not to say there isn't hard and quality engineering in here, but slapping Postgres compatible on it feels lazy at best.

Re: Amazon Aurora DSQL

#59

Post by benesch » Tue, Dec 03, 2024, 8:29 PM UTC

craigkerstiens wrote: post #58

e1g wrote: post #34

Just tried a quick test cluster - Identifies as PG 16.5 No views/triggers/sequences No foreign key constraints No extensions No NOTIFY ("ERROR: Function pg_notify not supported") No nested transactions No json(b) Unsupported PG features are now online https://docs.aws.amazon.com/aurora-dsql/latest/userguide/wor...

It feels very disingenuous to say "Postgres compatible" and have this as a missing feature set. I'm sure they'd quickly argue it's wire compatibility, but even then it's a slippery slope and wire compatible is left open to however the person wants to interpret it. There is no 'standard' or 'spec' for what makes something Postgres wire compatible. This feels like a strong overreach on the marketing front to leverage t…

> I'm sure they'd quickly argue it's wire compatibility, but even then it's a slippery slope and wire compatible is left open to however the person wants to interpret it.

I actually think that they'd argue they intend to close the feature gap for full Postgres semantics over time. Indeed their marketing was a bit wishful, but on Bluesky, Marc Brooker (one of the developers on the project) said they reused the parser, planner, and optimizer from Postgres: https://bsky.app/profile/marcbrooker.bsky.social/post/3lcghj...

That means they actually have a very good shot at approaching reasonably full Postgres compatibility (at a SQL semantics level, not just at the wire protocol level) over time.

Re: Amazon Aurora DSQL

#60

Post by bobnamob » Tue, Dec 03, 2024, 8:29 PM UTC

hobs wrote: post #33

steepben wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a blog on the technical details here: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/database/introducing-amazon-aur...

The most interesting page is always quotas and limits: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/aurora-dsql/latest/userguide/CHA... Seeing the No to configurable for some of the settings is the most telling hard limits that we can see up front. Some Very Noteable ones are: Maximum size of all data modified within a write transaction: 10 MiB Maximum transaction time: 5 minutes

The 10MiB transaction size limit smells a lot like FoundationDBs transaction size limit