Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit
levkk | on: PgDog is funded and coming to a database near you
Good thing we support HA as well: https://docs.pgdog.dev/features/load-balancer/

Load balancer with health checks and failover, works out of the box. :) Battle-tested at this point too, so could be worth a look.

r7n | parent | next
I've extensively used Dynamo (internally at Amazon and externally) and even founded a DB startup with it at it's core. Boiling down scalability of Postgres vs Dynamo as it's written in blog is a bit terse. Dynamo scales writes horizontally with the keyspace, forever. Postgres simply can't, and no number of layers between the machines and the developer changes that. Sharding, pooling, Citus are all layered on top of an engine where a given row's writes still land on one primary.
bofaGuy | root | parent | next
Dynamo DB isn’t even good at being a KV store. Almost every time we have to also back it with S3 because of size limitations.
moomoo11 | root | parent | next
did you use single table design?

and yeah you have to spend a lot of upfront time designing your data models

loading story #48488700
zamalek | root | parent | next
Dynamo is a fundamentally different DB to Postgres. If your problem fits into the dynamo approach (I'd argue that more problems do), then you should be using it. No all problems fit, though.
loading story #48481194
jsw | root | parent | next
Curious how the DB startup with Dynamo at its core went. We use it heavily. The primary tricky thing for us at the moment is aligning pricing with workload value.
loading story #48481315
cherioo | root | parent
Except that dynamo is still just glorified mysql? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18871661

I don’t think the backend matters. It’s the frontend wrapper that makes or breaks HA.

inigyou | root | parent
If Dynamo is glorified MySQL then Hacker News is also glorified MySQL. The system is the whole system, not just one part of it.
eikenberry | parent | next
That's great news! I'll bookmark this in case I'm forced to manage Postgres again.
loading story #48480647
doctorpangloss | parent
Is a load balancer HA?
gchamonlive | root | parent | next
Not by itself if it's naive, but if it's able to assess target health and avoid degraded instances then it becomes a component in HA, the other being integrating an orchestrator for gracious recovery.
doctorpangloss | root | parent
from their docs:

> PgDog does not detect primary failure and will not call pg_promote(). It is expected that the databases are managed externally by another tool, like Patroni or AWS RDS, which handle replica promotion.

nikolatt | root | parent
Why the snark comment? The PgDog project has been around for a while, it's not vibe coded.
znpy | root | parent | next
Not gp but I didn’t perceive any snark in the comment you are replying to
doctorpangloss | root | parent
okay, it does appear that the LLM didn't write any of this. i guess the simple answer is that it is not HA.
dev-ns8 | root | parent | next
Combined with a replication strategy and automated health checks, a load balancer could direct traffic to a healthy instance automatically.
dotancohen | root | parent
What happens when the load balancer fails?
inigyou | root | parent
HA has to be all the way through, in which case you might not need a load balancer because each client already connects to a separate server. If you do, then you can have one load balancer per client machine.