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Instant database clones with PostgreSQL 18

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Re: Instant database clones with PostgreSQL 18

#151

Post by pstuart »

nine_k wrote: post #125
riskable wrote: post #85

PostgreSQL seems to have become the be-all, end-all SQL database that does everything and does it all well. And it's free! I'm wondering why anyone would want to use anything else at this point (for SQL).

Postgres is wonderful, and has great many useful extensions. But: * MySQL has a much easier story of master-master replication. * Mongo has a much easier story of geographic distribution and sharding. (I know that Citus exists, and has used it.) * No matter how you tune Postgres, columnar databases like Clickhouse are still faster for analytics / time series. * Write-heavy applications still may benefit from somethin…

And SQLite is capable enough in many cases too...

Re: Instant database clones with PostgreSQL 18

#152

Post by leetrout »

QuercusMax wrote: post #150
Tostino wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love those "migration only fails in prod because of data quirks" bugs. They are the freaking worst. Have called off releases in the past because of it.

You should almost never test in prod, but sometimes testing on [a copy of] prod is useful

You should almost never stop testing in prod.

https://www.honeycomb.io/blog/testing-in-production

Re: Instant database clones with PostgreSQL 18

#153

Post by halfcat »

buu700 wrote: post #129
72deluxe wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Despite all of the complaints in other comments about the use of Claude Code, it looks interesting and I appreciated the video demo you put on the GitHub page.

Agentic coding detractors: "If AI is so great, where all the thriving new open source projects to prove it?" Also agentic coding detractors: "How dare you use AI to help build a new open source project." I'm joking and haven't read the comments you're referring to, but whether or not AI was involved is irrelevant per se. If anyone finds themselves having a gut reaction to "AI", just mentally replace it with "an inter…

> If anyone finds themselves having a gut reaction to "AI", just mentally replace it with "an intern" or "a guy from Fiverr"

It’s not the guy from Fiverr anyone is annoyed with. It’s the tech CEOs who beat everyone over the head with:

- ”the future will be a-guy-from-Fiverr-native”

- ”we are mandating that 80% of our employees incorporate a-guy-from-Fiverr into their daily workflow by year end”

And everyone pretends this is serious.

Then there are people who are pulling off cool demo stunts that amount to duct taping fireworks to a lawn mower but they post about it on X doing their best Steve Jobs thought leader impersonation.

And again everyone pretends like this is serious.

The annoyance is like that friend you tell about this great new song, and they’re excited, but only because it’s something they can to tell other people and look cool. Not because they’re into music.

Re: Instant database clones with PostgreSQL 18

#154

Post by buu700 »

halfcat wrote: post #153
buu700 wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agentic coding detractors: "If AI is so great, where all the thriving new open source projects to prove it?" Also agentic coding detractors: "How dare you use AI to help build a new open source project." I'm joking and haven't read the comments you're referring to, but whether or not AI was involved is irrelevant per se. If anyone finds themselves having a gut reaction to "AI", just mentally replace it with "an inter…

> If anyone finds themselves having a gut reaction to "AI", just mentally replace it with "an intern" or "a guy from Fiverr" It’s not the guy from Fiverr anyone is annoyed with. It’s the tech CEOs who beat everyone over the head with: - ”the future will be a-guy-from-Fiverr-native” - ”we are mandating that 80% of our employees incorporate a-guy-from-Fiverr into their daily workflow by year end” And everyone pretends…

I mean, if the end result is that I get a bunch of guys from Fiverr constantly at my beck and call for pennies on the dollar, I'm not sure why I should care what some CEO thinks they have to say to make money.

(Regarding mandates, of course they're a hamfisted solution, but it's not totally unreasonable that management would attempt to establish an incentive for its workforce to learn and put into practice a valuable new skill.)

Either way, that doesn't address the response to this project. Johan isn't Sam Altman. All Johan is guilty of here is building something useful and giving it to the rest of us for free.

Re: Instant database clones with PostgreSQL 18

#155

Post by halfcat »

fauigerzigerk wrote: post #101
pritambarhate wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even with LLMs delivering software that consistently works requires quite a bit of work and in most cases requires certain level of expertise. Humans also write quite a bit of garbage code. People using LLMs to code these days is similar to how majority people stopped using assembly and moved to C and C++, then to garbage collected languages and dynamically typed languages. People were always looking for ways to make…

I'm not opposed to AI generated code in principle. I'm just saying that we don't know how much effort was put into making this and we don't know whether it works. The existence of a repository containing hundereds of files, thousands of SLOCs and a folder full of tests tells us less today than it used to. There's one thing in particular that I find quite astonishing sometimes. I don't know about this particular proje…

> If we do not specify formally what we expect a tool to do, how do we know whether the tool has done what we expected, including in edge cases?

You don’t. That’s the scary part. Up until now, this was somewhat solved by injecting artificial friction. A bank that takes 5 days for a payment to clear. And so on.

But it’s worse than this, because most problems software solves cannot even be understood until you partially solve the problem. It’s the trying and failing that reveals the gap, usually by someone who only recognizes the gap because they were once embarrassed by it, and what they hear rhymes with their pain. AI doesn’t interface with physical reality, as far as we know, or have any mechanism to course correct like embarrassment or pain.

In the future, we will have flown off the cliff before we even know there was a problem. We will be on a space ship going so fast that we can’t see the asteroid until it’s too la...

Re: Instant database clones with PostgreSQL 18

#156

Post by anonzzzies »

elitan wrote: post #17

For those who can't wait for PG18 or need full instance isolation: I built Velo, which does instant branching using ZFS snapshots instead of reflinks. Works with any PG version today. Each branch is a fully isolated PostgreSQL container with its own port. ~2-5 seconds for a 100GB database. https://github.com/elitan/velo Main difference from PG18's approach: you get complete server isolation (useful for testing migrat…

Does it work with other dbs theoretically?

Re: Instant database clones with PostgreSQL 18

#157

Post by febed »

radimm wrote: post #3
mvcosta91 wrote: post #2

It looks very interesting for integration tests

OP here - yes, this is my use case too: integration and regression testing, as well as providing learning environments. It makes working with larger datasets a breeze.

If possible could you share a repo/gist with a working docker example? I’m curious how the instant clone world work there.

Re: Instant database clones with PostgreSQL 18

#158

Post by teiferer »

eudoxus wrote: post #145
teiferer wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could we please avoid the strawmen? Nowhere have I claimed that they didn't put work into this. Nowhere did I say that delegation is bad. I'd like to encourage a discussion, but then please counter the opinion that I gave, not a made-up one that I neither stated nor actually hold.

> You mean you told Claude a bunch of details and it built it for you? > Nowhere have I claimed that they didn't put work into this. There's some mental gymnastics. > please counter the opinion that I gave The reply your responding to did exactly that, and you just gave more snarky responses.

We all agree that crafting the right prompts (or however we call the CLAUDE.md instructions) is a lot of work, don't we? Of course they put work into this, it's a file of substantial size. And then Claude used it to build the thing. Where is a contradiction? I don't see the mental gymnastics, sorry.

Re: Instant database clones with PostgreSQL 18

#159

Post by Izkata »

pbh101 wrote: post #92
hu3 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

wasn't it? last I checked, Wright brothers used a catapult while Santos-Dumont made a plane that took off by itself.

I think it was the Wright brothers taking off from level ground while Santos-Dumpont got something flying off a cliff earlier.

Also it looks like Santos-Dumont's plane was 2-3 years after the Wright brothers. He was doing airships before that though - lighter-than-air craft that rely on a large balloon.

Edit: So it looks like the Wright brothers had catapult but didn't actually need it (their claim-to-fame flights didn't use it), but did otherwise need a "dolly" (a wooden cart, not a catapult) because the plane didn't have wheels attached to it. Then also Santos-Dumont was declared first in Europe because he demonstrated it in Paris during a period bad reporting had people in Europe questioning the legitimacy of the Wright brothers' flight.

Re: Instant database clones with PostgreSQL 18

#160

Post by blibble »

theturtletalks wrote: post #111
newusertoday wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

thanks for sharing its interesting approach. I am not sure why people are complaining most of the software is written with the help of agents these days.

It’s rampant. Launch anything these days and it’s bombarded with “vibe-coded” comments. The issue of quality makes sense since it’s so easy to build these days, but when the product is open-source, these vibe coded comments make no sense. Users can literally go read the code or my favorite? Repomix it, pop it into AI Studio, and ask Gemini what this person has built, what value it brings, and does it solve the proble…

gee I wonder why people don't want "AI" code anywhere near their single source of truth (database)
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