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EdgeDB is now Gel and Postgres is the future

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Re: EdgeDB is now Gel and Postgres is the future

#91

Post by sgarland »

1st1 wrote: post #55
kelseydh wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also there are now databases purpose built for specific domains. E.g. if you are building a financial ledger I would way rather be interfacing with TigerBeetle than scaffolding an application-driven ledger around Postgres. https://tigerbeetle.com/ . If I am scraping giant amounts of data I would run far away from Postgres for other databases like Amazon Redshift.

Perhaps. The trouble usually arrives when you need functionality that your specialized database doesn’t have. Then you end up maintaining two databases and spreading your data, business logic, and resources between them. To each their own, though... there are certainly valid use cases for this.

Tbf, at least for TigerBeetle, they make no bones about the fact that they are hyper-specialized, and they recommend using a general OLTP DB alongside it for the rest of your business logic. It’s purely a ledger DB.

Re: EdgeDB is now Gel and Postgres is the future

#92

Post by sgarland »

paulryanrogers wrote: post #23
atombender wrote: post #19

> PostgreSQL's query planner/optimizer is decidedly state-of-the-art Postgres's cost-based planner is good, but it's a decidedly 1980s design, predating the famous but also outdated Volcano/Cascades systems (used by Microsoft SQL Server and CockroachDB and others). So much has happened in the field of query optimization in the last 30 years, very little of which has ended up in Postgres, I think. Postgres has gotten…

How does MySQL compare? I get the sense that innovations land there sooner because of all the mega corps that use it.

MySQL hasn’t had nearly as many innovations. That said, for a long time, it was often faster for simpler queries, and especially range queries, IFF your schema was designed to exploit the fact that it’s a clustering index, so rows are physically located next to the PK. If you’re using UUIDv4 PKs, you’re throwing away its entire advantage, and Postgres will almost certainly be faster.

One notable exception for MySQL is INSTANT DDL in 8.x, thanks to contributions from Tencent, which is an extremely nice QoL upgrade that Postgres doesn’t have. The other is logical replication, something Postgres does support now (and has for several years), but didn’t for a long time.

Re: EdgeDB is now Gel and Postgres is the future

#93

Post by sgarland »

genewitch wrote: post #45
kelseydh wrote: post #42

Postgres is great, but the level of work required to scale it on large workloads is really quite overwhelming. You really need expert-level knowledge to scale it. Just ask anybody who has had to shard their database.

I ran a 4000qps postgres database set to use no more than 640KB of RAM (its in the configs). The DBA was having fun with my silly idea until Slow-Query takes 10 seconds and we flipped back over to the production systems with much more allowed memory for postgres. My purpose was to show that Linux itself is pretty fast at caching and paging, even if Postgres was hamstrung. The db actually ran fine except for the slow…

No offense, but 4000 QPS is not large. I ran a 100K+ QPS MySQL instance with 384 GiB of RAM.

This is all subjective, of course, but I wouldn’t call 100K QPS large, either. It’s getting on the high end of what you might reasonably want to handle without horizontal scaling, but it’s still not “large.”

Re: EdgeDB is now Gel and Postgres is the future

#95

Post by jakubmazanec »

EdgeDB is simply great. Schema, migrations, TypeScript query builder, auth are all awesome features - I love that for my small Remix apps I don't have to create separate API layer, I just use the DB directly.

I like the new name (mostly because typing "edgedb" when using the CLI was annoying). Hopefully the new documentation will be better, because the old one wasn't very usable and a little bit sparse.

Re: EdgeDB is now Gel and Postgres is the future

#96

Post by krashidov »

1st1 wrote: post #76
krashidov wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I have an existing postgres db how hard is it to migrate? Can I write regular joins if I need to? Do you have plans or do you already support db branching ?

> If I have an existing postgres db how hard is it to migrate? The main hurdle would to migrate the schema. You'll have to define your schema in Gel (take a look at the reference here [1]) and write a script to copy your data. We are discussing internally how we can simplify this process, this is becoming a popular question. > Can I write regular joins if I need to? You can use EdgeQL and SQL side by side now though…

Thank you for the response!

This is great info.

> The main hurdle would to migrate the schema

I'm sure you know this but I know drizzle lets you generate schemas from an existing db. Not sure how applicable that is to Gel.

https://orm.drizzle.team/docs/drizzle-kit-pull

> We call Postgres databases "branches" in Gel. And we have tooling around them [3] to have git-like experience with them.

Sounds like it's a yes - thanks!

Re: EdgeDB is now Gel and Postgres is the future

#97

Post by zeeg »

kelseydh wrote: post #42

Postgres is great, but the level of work required to scale it on large workloads is really quite overwhelming. You really need expert-level knowledge to scale it. Just ask anybody who has had to shard their database.

Define large workload.

Sentry runs large workloads and Postgres isn't a bottleneck. We have also never employed a DBA. Most users never need to shard their database, and at most can just partition datasets by tables for _extremely_ high volume workloads.

You just have to consider architecture and optimize things that are slow, just like any other software. Nothing is free at the end of the day, and nothing else gives you the flexibility that Postgres does, particularly these days with its growing high value extensions.

Re: EdgeDB is now Gel and Postgres is the future

#98

Post by pcthrowaway »

scotttrinh wrote: post #39
re-thc wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 a…

For every person who passed on EdgeDB on the suspicion it was related to edge computing, someone may have clicked it for the same reason entirely and found something else compelling.

Personally I think EdgeDB was a much better and descriptive name than Gel. I haven't used EdgeDB/Gel yet, but have been looking at it with excitement for years now waiting for the opportunity to use it.

I am worried that the rename will work against you since you've built such an excellent brand around EdgeDB with so many glowing testimonials.

Re: EdgeDB is now Gel and Postgres is the future

#99

Post by ndriscoll »

lmm wrote: post #77
the_duke wrote: post #68

Lesson: if you start a new database company, start with SQL. Almost every DB that starts without SQL support eventually ends up adding it back in later.

That's like saying you should start with microservices/kubernetes/etc. because every company ends up needing those things. IMO you should delay adding SQL as long as possible so that it doesn't compromise your design.

Not using SQL makes it basically a complete non-starter for any business unless it had some extremely compelling niche feature that you absolutely need and can't be found elsewhere. SQL has a massive ecosystem around it. All the examples I see are either some bespoke typescript library, or treat queries as strings. Obviously it can't hook into any of the zillion query builder libraries out there, and you'd have to go implement one or write a decent amount of code for an existing one to be able to use it. I also don't see any docs for JVM usage at all, which is like half the industry.

If you want to experiment with syntax for database queries, macros that translate to SQL at compile time seem like a much better way to get traction, but pretty much everything I've seen ends up being a more verbose cosmetic variation of SQL. The one big flaw to fix is that SELECT should have been at the end.

Re: EdgeDB is now Gel and Postgres is the future

#100

Post by scotttrinh »

halfmatthalfcat wrote: post #67
scotttrinh wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

I don't want to pile on but it seems like a lot of "going on feels" versus any quantifiable justification.

That's fair, but I think going on _just_ the quantifiable stuff was still enough of a justification for us. My feels are that the cost of our confusing former name is higher than we know, but the known cost was still great enough.
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