Hacker News Reader

Comment by bdcravens | Hacker News Reader

No, but they do it typically: "Announcing AWS X, our implementation of {open source project}" (they do this with MongoDB, ActiveMQ, etc). The product mentioned here is more than just a managed version of the open source project; it is a major component however. (good example is Redshift, though when they announced it they barely mentioned the role Postgresql plays in that to be honest)

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon-redshift-the-new-aws...

View on HN

Import to realise that the DocumentDB (Amazon's MongoDB emulation) is not based on the MongoDB code base.

The code may not be based on their code, but I don't see how you can have an emulation of X that isn't based on X. Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, but there's nothing stopping them from including some of the other forms. Plus a little gratitude, maybe.

Arent Google and Oracle fighting the emulation X not based on X right now? (where X is Java API)

Every talk AWS does about Redshift they mention that it’s based on Postgres. They tell you to download a Postgres driver to connect to it with any language besides Java for which a JDBC driver is provided.

Well ... they tell you that not because they're bending over backwards to give postgres credit. They're doing it to tell you that the barrier of entry to this database is nearly 0 if you are already using Postgres.

You haven’t watch the reInvent talks have you?

But if you try to use the same schema design from a standard Postgres database and use the same query patterns, you will be sorely disappointed. Redshift uses a columnar store and is an OLAP database as opposed to Postgres which is a traditional database.

You can implement a columnar store in Postgres. (Of course there's more to Redshift than that)

https://github.com/citusdata/cstore_fdw

No I totally get that. It is designed for data warehousing workloads rather than transactional. I'm saying that I have seen it more as a feature of "you use your existing tools and drivers" since it speaks the postgres wire protocol.

I agree, but I was trying to be apples to apples and compare launch announcements, and when Redshift was announced, the discussion of Postgres was quite muted (admittedly several years ago, so their messaging may have shifted over time)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com