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EdgeDB is now Gel and Postgres is the future

geldata.com

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Re: EdgeDB is now Gel and Postgres is the future

#31
post #3

Co-founder here - AMA.

I was hoping to learn more but many of the docs.geldata.com links on the GitHub page are 404 right now, mentioning just in case nobody has reported that yet.

We'll be fixing them shortly. We're rolling out a new documentation system. Apologies for the inconvenience.

Re: EdgeDB is now Gel and Postgres is the future

#32
post #18
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was the rebrand really just for simplicity and clarity? It seems like a lot of work to change the name when it was already a pretty established toolchain, not just for your team, but, and this is more important, for your community. I actually think EdgeDB was a far better name. It actually meant something; yes, it wasn't a pure graph database, but it did work with the general concept of graphs and edges. Gel means no…

EdgeQL stays EdgeQL :) I like that name. I also liked EdgeDB (I'm biased, I coined that name myself). But at every conference we had the same conversation with developers: "EdgeDB? Huh, must be an edge-computing database. Are you running SQLite?" There are other minor reasons for the rename, but this annoyance persisted for a number of years and we decided to pull the plug on it. > I've been a true evangelist for Edg…

> But at every conference we had the same conversation with developers

I wonder if this will really go away or just be replaced with something else. Is it really the name "specifically" or how a lot of people work?

(i.e. going by first impressions, connotations, memes, etc)

> "EdgeDB? Huh, must be an edge-computing database. Are you running SQLite?"

"Gel? Huh, must be for cosmetics. Is this for retail?"

p.s. had no issues with EdgeDB.

Re: EdgeDB is now Gel and Postgres is the future

#33
post #3

Co-founder here - AMA.

3 questions.

How does this compare to solutions like Supabase. What stands out with Supabase is the sdk support. My current project is probably going to stay on Supabase( it's a hobbyist project regardless), but hypothetically if I was an enterprise prospect how would you pitch your solution.

Do you support functions, that I could call from the client for more advanced logic that can't be done with queries ?

Why not brand as GelDB. Would probably be easier to Google. Plus it tells me instantly what your selling.

PS: Can you offer something like a hobbyist tier for 10$ a month. I don't want to deal with my project randomly shutting off, but I have extremely low requirements in terms of storage during development.

Re: EdgeDB is now Gel and Postgres is the future

#36
post #34

is the pricing per database or per cluster/account?

Strictly speaking we charge for compute and storage. You can create variously-sized Gel instances and within those instances an arbitrary number of branches.

so I can have multiple free dev dbs using 1/4 compute unit?

Re: EdgeDB is now Gel and Postgres is the future

#37
post #7

Tried many ORMs to get them to work in SQL, but EdgeDB's was the one that worked extremely straightforwardly, literally without any issues that weren't due to not following the instructions. No bugs, no configuration errors, no nothing. It all just worked. So I think you guys deserve more recognition and credit for what is clearly a very well-engineered product that I intend to use for some of my personal projects.

Have you tried drizzle? If so, what's your beef? (The only one I've had is lack of down-migrations)

Drizzle still lacks a lot of features / stability (bug fixes required).

Hopefully it improves over time.

Re: EdgeDB is now Gel and Postgres is the future

#39
post #32
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

EdgeQL stays EdgeQL :) I like that name. I also liked EdgeDB (I'm biased, I coined that name myself). But at every conference we had the same conversation with developers: "EdgeDB? Huh, must be an edge-computing database. Are you running SQLite?" There are other minor reasons for the rename, but this annoyance persisted for a number of years and we decided to pull the plug on it. > I've been a true evangelist for Edg…

> But at every conference we had the same conversation with developers I wonder if this will really go away or just be replaced with something else. Is it really the name "specifically" or how a lot of people work? (i.e. going by first impressions, connotations, memes, etc) > "EdgeDB? Huh, must be an edge-computing database. Are you running SQLite?" "Gel? Huh, must be for cosmetics. Is this for retail?" p.s. had no i…

Scott from Gel here. I suspect for everyone we talked to in the "So, this is a database for Edge computing?" camp there were a dozen people who thought that and just kept moving even if they were our target audience. It's hard to quantify just what the cost have having a name with such a strong connotation (which has arguably gone up and down in the hype cycle over the lifetime of EdgeDB) has been.

Gel doesn't have any really strong existing computing connotations, so maybe people might make a stretch that it's about some non-computing-related domain and maybe we miss reaching them. But that just seems far less likely than trying to continue to push against the overwhelming feeling that "Edge" just has too much baggage and was working against us.

Personally, I think it's fine if people find the name confounding or just personally dislike it. I think products like Supabase, Neon, Drizzle, CockroachDB, Django, Flask, Express, etc etc kind of prove that if your name is general enough, you'll overcome that reaction eventually via recognition for the value of the product itself.

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