They did hire a bunch of experienced engineers. I'd rather have them actually contribute to postgres (which amazon pretty much doesn't do, some bug reports aside).
> Presumably, upstreams like MariaDB and PostgreSQL have forgone similar enhancements for a better reason than "only Amazon employees are smart enough to figure it out".
Some of them are harder to do if you don't have as much control over the environment as amazon does...
That's why no announcements cover change fundamental change to either database - all the features we're seeing a the kinds you'd do on a personal scale with SSD RAIDs and ZFS (or other copy on write FSes), except on a datacenter scale.
Have you seen the code see to know that they are just “performance hacks”? Have you thought that when you can actually spend millions on a project you might be able to throw some top notch engineers at it?
And on top of that, in the realm of database engineering, Amazon is absolutely a newcomer, they've got another good 15 years before they can even start to be in contention for "reliable and trustworthy database vendor". Goes doubly when you consider that Aurora is essentially just a bunch of performance hacks to (old versions of) InnoDB and Postgres. Presumably, upstreams like MariaDB and PostgreSQL have forgone similar enhancements for a better reason than "only Amazon employees are smart enough to figure it out".