PostgreSQL

initial thoughts on AWS DSQL

1. PG compatible (pg is dominant at this point)
2. Most of the article talked about HA
3. AWS has a proprietary, internal distributed transaction log service that is supposedly the most important piece of AWS and everything in AWS depends on it. Hope that teams makes 10M annual tc each.
4. It depresses me to think that the future of compute and storage is: run it on aws

It's really neat to think about having a network storage layer that can support many database frontends. this seems like the future. Neon et al. are moving in this direction. Also something that Stonebraker has been talking about for a while now.

initial thoughts on AWS DSQL

1. PG compatible (pg is dominant at this point)
2. Most of the article talked about HA
3. AWS has a proprietary, internal distributed transaction log service that is supposedly the most important piece of AWS and everything in AWS depends on it. Hope that teams makes 10M annual tc each.
4. It depresses me to think that the future of compute and storage is: run it on aws

It's really neat to think about having a network storage layer that can support many database frontends. this seems like the future. Neon et al. are moving in this direction. Also something that Stonebraker has been talking about for a while now.

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/database/introducing-amazon-aurora-dsql/

Have you ever looked at pglite from the electricsql team?

Been thinking about it as embedded database into clients

Farcaster Development Boutique @ https://dTech.vision 💜 in love with tech 🤓decentralization, fitness and oldschool rap 😎

Enduser client 

Where the interaction happens, frontend is etc

Got it. Maybe it is good for that? I'm not so sure.

Intended use is as embedded db in that sense to be an alternative to SQLite that can sync through electric with the backend Postgres so dev does sync local db queries

Yea exact use case I'm considering using it for. You stick your indexer on the client via tauri app or in browser and user syncs their local data. Then the data gets synced with a larger postgres instance on backend server

I guess I don't see the problem with querying for data when you need it. Or issuing a batch of queries if you want to amortize networking costs.

As far as databases go, disk is usually the bottleneck (not processing a query) and I don't see how this solution addresses that problem in a fundamentally better way than the status quo. What specific problem is being solved with "sync"?

When you stick the database on the client you have 0 loading spinners and native app ux. The app will work offline. 

If you have ever used Linear that is currently considered the absolute best UX possible to build.

A good website to explore this architecture is here

When you stick the database on the client you have 0 loading spinners and native app ux. The app will work offline. 

If you have ever used Linear that is currently considered the absolute best UX possible to build.

A good website to explore this architecture is here https://localfirstweb.dev/

Works well for decentralized apps because you remove a trust assumption on an operator and instead the operator becomes just a way to enhance the ux but not necessary for basic functionality

I generally don’t think of it as “why put the data locally” I look at it the other direction and ask “why put data on a server” because the default simplistic architecture is to just stick the data in the same process as the program

The answer to why stick it on a server is 
1. It is easier to multiclient until tech like replicache showed up
2. The server is more durable 

But server comes with ux tradeoffs

So generally the only reason we don’t make things local first is because it’s hard from programmers pov to do otherwise. Anyone who needs significantly better ux to compete in the marketplace like linear did has the opportunity to do so via eating glass with local first and it’s inevitable as the abstractions close the gap in how much it “costs” in developer effort drops

Too long of a conversation to have online but I’m familiar with local first and I hear what you are saying and I still don’t think it’s an interesting idea.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯