Yes Im serious. This is one of the most foundational & key levels of computing: storing & quering data. Without this, computing isnt good for much.
Getting good at this is a huge task for humanity. Right now that task is almost entirely being fulfilled by far off hyperscalers. Aurora, BigTable, Firebase, DynamoDB, CosmoDB, more special works like DataDog Husky... the world is running off vast super-awesome dataengines. But ones that are not ours, that we cant hack on, that we cant run ourselves. It might as well be the Martian's (little green men's) databases as far as I'm concerned: these are not humanity's heritdge & humanity is cut off from active participation with them.
Right now there are so so so few scalable data systems available for the world, that we have. This seems like a great & novel effort to radically open up the range of human capabilities, in one of the most important sectors of computing: handling data.
We have lots of other cloudware for humankind but data has seemingly been much slower & un-scaled. I agree with this @anilgulecha comment[1]:
> This is the missing piece on cloud for masses
> "But ones that are not ours, that we cant hack on, that we cant run ourselves."
Who is "we"? Is your entire issue that not everything is open-source?
> "these are not humanity's heritdge & humanity is cut off from active participation with them."
This is still incredibly exaggerated. Everything humanity does is humanity's heritage. There are plenty of open-source databases of all types and sizes if you look: https://db-engines.com/en/ranking
The most notable feature of Neon, that makes it so exceptionally smart, is that it takes the humanity's existing first best choice default-go-to database, by a country mile, and layers in really smart decoupling of storage to help it scale. Reinventing things from scratch can be a win, but that this is already a well known quantity, much loved & cherished & used by all, hacked by all, grown by all is a planet-sized huge plus mark.
I think you vastly overrate the broad availability of alternatives to this, of potential starting places others might explore. Most of your list is dominated by proprietary whatever. Even skipping that, yes, there is a ton of novelty & promise, the potential for breakthroughs. But this is starting with the best, and pushing it into the cloud-layer, into the troposphere.
There are dozens of "scalable postgres" alternatives from Redshift to Citus to CockroachDB to Yugabyte. I find it strange that you say its overrating the availability when you're also comparing it to something that isn't even a full product yet.
Thank you for the comment rektide. We of course would love to see constructive comments and criticism.
- Neon CEO
I appreciate your concern for the integrity of HN discussions, but the thing to do if you suspect abuse or manipulation is to email [email protected] so we can look into it. Posting about it in the threads themselves is explicitly against the rules.
but please take a look at the flagging attack on all of my comments outside this thread. the timing is too peculiar here
somebody really didnt like what i wrote above ;)
> "great & desperately needed potential leap for mankind"
Are you being serious? That's very hyperbolic if so.