If you are looking for something that is more Postgres flavored (meaning we're just an extension to it so you get all the good stuff of Postgres such as JSONB, PostGIS, etc.) then we hope we'd be a good fit. And we run a managed service on top of AWS as well (https://www.citusdata.com/product/cloud) built by the team that built Heroku Postgres. If curious on pricing you can find it at https://www.citusdata.com/pricing/
I'm not trying to compare on a per-mb level, but it would be nice for smaller scale workloads.
Though hopefully you'll find many more useful ones about Citus and Postgres broadly on our blog: https://www.citusdata.com/blog/
Imagine.. RDS is literally the ONLY place where you can buy a 10 GB data multi-AZ replicated, snapshotted and managed postgresql.
Its pretty much a monopoly, now that Google seems to have officially closed the book on ever supporting postgresql.
Not true. I was looking for a hosted Postgres provider and discovered these two:
https://aiven.io/postgresql (tried it, worked excellently)
I would be hesitant to say that this is a fact.
Uh, how? I wouldn't be surprised to see a Cloud SQL-like managed Postgres service from Google.
While there's obviously some overlap in the potential market for any relational datastore service, Spanner doesn't really overlap with a cloud Postgres service as much as Cloud SQL does.
the issue is that the migration path of self hosted mysql to cloud sql to spanner is pretty well defined. I dont see postgresql being strategically important or relevant to google for anything.
if I was a startup deciding on my database, there's a lot less compelling reasons to choose postgresql from the point of view of long term viability. hell, I can pretty much do a back of the envelope calculation on how much will it cost me to support 100 million users on mysql.
Is it safe to think that Evernote and Snapchat - startups who are giant success stories - are google mysql hosted? (in some form.. maybe even spanner)
So uber, snapchat, Google, Evernote and a clear cut path for upward scale.
I have very less hope for postgresql on google cloud.
What does Cloud Spanner have to do with MySQL? It's neither API nor SQL-dialect compatible with MySQL. If there are MySQL bits used somewhere in the implementation, they are well hidden, and irrelevant to users.
> the issue is that the migration path of self hosted mysql to cloud sql to spanner is pretty well defined.
So what? Were there a Cloud SQL-like Postgres offering, the same would be true; Spanner is no closer to MySQL than Postgres. (If anything, it's SQL dialect is a little closer to Postgres's dialect than MySQL's, though not so much that you'll get away without doing substantial conversion going from either.)
Er, that's a bet I'd strongly suggest you didn't make.
If anything, hosted Postgres from Google Cloud will be priced in a way that makes Spanner some what more attractive, as a way to get conversions to Spanner in the long-run.
How many nodes are you looking to run for $300/month? Unless you have more than 150gb/node of data, you don't really need a distributed database which is what Citus is for.
Please note what im paying for is availability and reliability.. not for a database per se.
And im not even talking Aurora. That stuff is going to blow every other price point out of the water at probably higher reliability metrics.
For example, being a MSSQL performance tuning expert requires years of experience and probably pays very well, but just the other day I read an anecdotal story where someone switched a large BI database to use columnar indexes, allowing them to replace very complex (extreme manual tuning to achieve acceptable performance) queries with just standard SQL with comparable performance.
How long until the scale, pricing, and now transparent & full(?) sql compliance offered by these cloud platforms starts to make traditional RDBMS platforms a niche platform?
EDIT: Also, most DB users don't need global-scale databases.
That is not necessarily a foregone conclusion. In tandem with their marketing of Azure, MS is pushing SQL Server on Linux heavily [0].
"SQL Server is Windows-only" is no longer a valid argument to choose another RDBMS if a startup uses lots of MS tooling but deploy on Linux servers.
[0] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/sql-server/sql-server-vnext-...
There's a reason why regulated (including self-regulated) professions have continuing education requirements; progress happens and you become obsolete if you don't keep up with it.
Just because tech isn't regulated doesn't mean it's any more sensible to expect to remain valuable without keeping up with progress in the field.
That being said, MSSQL experts will likely have good-paying opportunities for quite a while, for the same reason thats then case for any well-established enterprise technology: lots of systems are going to be around using it long after it has become distressingly uncool to spend time learning.
Four years ago, I determined that while development work might seem to be near the top of the food chain, there will at some point where my work will be replaced by AIs.
This is not so different from how word processors replaced the specialist job of typesetters. Word processors make "good enough" typesetting. You can still find typesetters practicing their craft; the rest of us use word processors and don't even think about it.
At the time, I was learning to put the Buddhist ideals of emptiness and impermanence to practice, and to become more emotionally aware: the _main_ reason I had thought I would never be replaced by an AI writing software has more to do with wishful thinking and attachment than any clear-sighted look at this.
I also made a decision to work on the technologies to accelerate this. Rather than becoming intoxicated by the worry, anxiety, and existential anguish, I decided try to face it. Fears are inherently irrational, but just because they are irrational does not mean it is not what you are experiencing. Fears are not so easily banished by labeling them as irrational. Denial is a form of willful ignorance.
Now, having said all that, whether our tech base will come to that, who can say?
Since then, I have been tracking things like:
Viv - a chat assistant that can write it's own queries
DeepMind's demonstration of creating a Turing-complete machine with deep learning using a memory module.
I watched a tech enthusiast write a chat bot. He does not write software professionally. Talking with him over the months when he tinkers with in his spare time, I realized that in the future, you won't have as many software engineers writing code; you would learn how to _train_ AIs when they become sufficiently accessible to the masses. Skills in coaching, negotiation, and management becomes more important then some of the fundamental skills supporting software engineering. And like typesetting, I can see development work being pushed down the eco-ladder.
It's not surprising to me to see that Wired article about how coding becoming blue collar work. And even that will eventually be pushed down even further.
It's not surprising to me about Google's site-reliability engineering book, branding, and approach. I have done system admin work in the past, and I can already see traditional, manual sysadmin work being replaced.
It's easy to get nihilistic about this, but that isn't my point here either. I know the human potential is incredible, but I think we have to let go of our self-serving narratives first.
The second idea that interests me is this idea of very high technology. It is built upon layer after layer of very clever tech year after year that I wonder how long it would take to start again from scratch if some disaster rendered a large part of one of these layers unusable.
For instance, if you were on a desert island, could you (would you want to?) build some piece of tech? An electric generator would be useful, perhaps. How long would it take to build? You'd need knowledge, raw materials, plant, fuel etc. It's not an easy solve. And that's way down the tech stack before you start talking about AIs. I suppose what I'm saying is, that the AI layer is based upon such high tech, that is inherently fragile, because it is so hard to do.
I don't know! :-D
I don't know what society would look like from a purely technological point of view. From a spiritualist point of view, though, it could either go very well or very badly. When everything is automated, would people have enough time and space to really start asking the really big questions? Or would it accelerate and intensify existential anguish?
> There are a small number of people reaping the benefits, and huge swathes of the population being marginalised and disenfranchised as a result.
Yeah. Arguably, this has already happened.
> The second idea that interests me is this idea of very high technology. It is built upon layer after layer of very clever tech year after year that I wonder how long it would take to start again from scratch if some disaster rendered a large part of one of these layers unusable.
The stuff of sci-fi :-D Among them, alt-history novels (what happens when someone drops into a lower-tech era; you'd have to start from 0 ... literally, 0, as in Arabic numerals).
Open Source Ecology is trying to preserve some of this tech base. I find their aims awesome, though I am not sure how effective it is.
The flip side are things being spoken from well outside the techno-sphere, (for example, shamans and mystics) It is the perspective that the further evolution of human consciousness will, at some point, no longer require a technology or artifacts. Technology seen as the last crutch. The collapse of a high-technic civilization then sets the stage for a removal of that crutch, and humans learn to stand with two feet (so to speak).
Not a fair argument against the point made above, however, I believe we will find the next big challenge for software to solve as soon as traditional problems are commoditized/automated and considered solved. Also, just knowing how to code is not going to be enough. You must complement it with domain expertise to solve challenging unsolved real world problems.
There are also plenty of choices evolving for developers who aren't looking for hosted solutions (which can sometimes be a showstopper for enterprise on-prem deployments). There's a growing ecosystem of distributed open-source databases to look out for too.
Take Citus, for instance – a Postgres-compatible distributed store which automatically parallelizes normal SQL queries across machines. It's as easy to set up as adding an extension, and people are doing some staggering things in prod with it.
Different audience from BigQuery and Spanner, but no less exciting.
Disclaimer: no professional association, but love their product and the team.