RedCrowbar (u/RedCrowbar)

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

RedCrowbar commented on EdgeDB is now Gel and Postgres is the future geldata.com/blog/edgedb-i... · Posted by u/mmastrac

atombender · 6 months ago

> 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Postgres's cost-based planner is good, but it's a decidedly 1980s design, predating the famous but also outdated Volcano/Cascades systems (used by Microsoft SQL Server and CockroachDB and others).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 parallel workers and a JIT, but the fundamental design is largely unchanged. It's also quite conservative about adding improvements; other databases has had some variation of index skip scans for ages (Oracle has probably had it for 20 years now, and you can get it through the TimeScale extension), but Postgres is still working on supporting it natively.

The state of the art is arguably Umbra [1], a research project by Thomas Neumann's group at the university of Munich, the successor to HyPer, which is now being commercialized as CedarDB. Their analysis of the Postgres query planner is an interesting read [2].

[1] https://umbra-db.com/

[2] https://www.vldb.org/pvldb/vol9/p204-leis.pdf

RedCrowbar · 6 months ago

The paper seems to mostly focus on the quality of cardinality estimation (mostly driven by statistics) which is admittedly one of the frequent sore points in Postgres. There's been some progress in that area though (CREATE STATISTICS being a highlight).

RedCrowbar commented on EdgeDB is now Gel and Postgres is the future geldata.com/blog/edgedb-i... · Posted by u/mmastrac

5Qn8mNbc2FNCiVV · 6 months ago

Btw, I want to start them separately because we deploy a standard HA Postgres cluster and want to rely on proven tooling.

RedCrowbar · 6 months ago

That's already supported, you just need to set the Postgres cluster URI in the `GEL_SERVER_BACKEND_DSN` env var ([1]).

[1] https://docs.geldata.com/reference/reference/environment#gel...

RedCrowbar commented on EdgeDB is now Gel and Postgres is the future geldata.com/blog/edgedb-i... · Posted by u/mmastrac

5Qn8mNbc2FNCiVV · 6 months ago

Just wish the local development story wasn't so bound to a installation or the concept of instances. I just want a compose file in my repositories that starts Postgres and "Gel" separately with the option to execute commands within the container

I mean, I don't need it anymore because I did it myself now, but it definitely annoys me that it's not first class

RedCrowbar · 6 months ago

You can use Docker (and Docker Compose) with Gel for local development [1], but of course you'd miss out on most management features of the CLI, because it's not built to supplant the docker/docker-compose CLI. Are there any particular issues you have currently with the Docker image approach?

[1] https://docs.geldata.com/resources/guides/deployment/docker

RedCrowbar commented on EdgeDB is now Gel and Postgres is the future geldata.com/blog/edgedb-i... · Posted by u/mmastrac

armincerf · 6 months ago

It says gel is to Postgres what typescript is to JavaScript, so can I add gel to an existing Postgres instance and get the benefits of the nicer query language or does it rely on special tables? If I use some other extension like timescale is that compatible with gel?

And is there a story for replication/subscribing to queries for real time updates?

Postgres is so powerful partly because of its ecosystem, so I want to know how much of that ecosystem is still useable if I’m using gel on top of Postgres

RedCrowbar · 6 months ago

(article author here)

> If I use some other extension like timescale is that compatible with gel [...] Postgres is so powerful partly because of its ecosystem, so I want to know how much of that ecosystem is still useable if I’m using gel on top of Postgres

Playing nice with the ecosystem is the goal. We started off with more of a walled garden, but with 6.0 a lot of those walls came down with direct SQL support and support for standalone extensions [1]. There is a blog post coming about this specifically tomorrow (I think).

> And is there a story for replication

Replication/failover works out of the box.

> subscribing to queries for real time updates?

Working on it.

> so can I add gel to an existing Postgres instance and get the benefits of the nicer query language or does it rely on special tables?

Gel is built around its schema, so you will need to import your SQL schema. After that you can query things with EdgeQL (or SQL/ORM as before).

[1] https://github.com/geldata/gel-postgis

RedCrowbar commented on EdgeDB is now Gel and Postgres is the future geldata.com/blog/edgedb-i... · Posted by u/mmastrac

hiccuphippo · 6 months ago

Ok, but is it gel as in gif or gel as in gif?

RedCrowbar · 6 months ago

Gel as in gif obviously! :-)

RedCrowbar commented on Show HN: PRQL in PostgreSQL github.com/kaspermarstal/... · Posted by u/kaspermarstal

ttfkam · 2 years ago

    "A jaw-dropping amount of effort has been spent attempting to bridge the gap between the relational paradigm of SQL and the object-oriented nature of modern programming languages. EdgeDB sidesteps this problem by modeling data in an object-relational way."

All the best to the team. I however truly hope this isn't the direction the industry moves toward. I thought we learned our lesson from MongoDB. I still believe data is best modeled in sets, not objects.

The solution isn't for databases to become more like object stores but for general purpose programming languages to be more amenable to seamless access of set-oriented data.

More stuff like this:

https://github.com/porsager/postgres

https://github.com/launchbadge/sqlx

RedCrowbar · 2 years ago

EdgeDB is NOT an object store. It is "relational model enhanced" instead where a set is a fundamental building block [1] so not just relations are sets, but attributes can be sets also.

[1] https://www.edgedb.com/docs/edgeql/sets#ref-eql-everything-i...

RedCrowbar commented on Jepsen: MySQL 8.0.34 jepsen.io/analyses/mysql-... · Posted by u/aphyr

pkulak · 2 years ago

And serializable transactions fail all the time. You have to always code so that re-running them is trivial and expected. 99% of the queries I write are fine at the lowest transaction level, and that saves me and the DB lots of time.

RedCrowbar · 2 years ago

If your database client is any good, it should do the retries for you. EdgeDB uses serializable isolation (as the only option), and all our bindings are coded to retry on transaction serialization errors by default.

Transaction deadlocks are another common issue that is triggered by concurrent transactions even at lower levels and should be retried also.