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fizixer

Can't you spin up your own software in a docker instance on the cloud? what does official support mean here?

New to cloud.

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This is talking about the managed database service.

There is nothing stopping you from renting a VM and running whatever you want.

You can. This is for Google's fully managed SQL service, "fully managed" meaning that you don't have to directly manage Docker instances or VMs yourself.

But you do have to specify CPU and memory and pay for those for having the database running - even if you're not calling it.

What I'd like is to pay for what I use when calls are being made. Providing an SQL interface as a service, rather than actually running a whole personally copy of a database.

Something like https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon-aurora-postgresql-se... ?

Yup, except that's got a cold start time of 25 seconds. So no use for a low usage system. (One, for instance, that gets used a couple of times a day, but really needs to be available when it is.)

https://dev.to/dvddpl/how-to-deal-with-aurora-serverless-col...

Yes, the way to avoid a cold start is to keep it constantly running. Which rather undoes the point of only being charged when you're using it.

Well, you can scale it 64x on demand...seems like a good tradeoff.

Oh yes - if you are operating at the middle to high end it's a great system.

But if you want "Read a tiny table once an hour, carry out a simple action in the circumstances are right" then paying for a database to be taking up a core 24/7 is not going to work for you.

So I wish it scaled down as well as up.

True...something like Amazon Lightsail might be better for that (starts at $3.50/month if you roll your own, and $15/m for a managed DB). Or you can do some sort of hybrid model...

Just out of curiosity, what would an acceptable cold start time be? I feel like there’s a SQLite + function-as-a-service opportunity here.

Near zero. If my data is only a few kB then an already running process should be able to read it from disk and read/write the data almost instantly. They should be working on a version of MySQL that can do this without spawning a whole new running instance on a whole new server.

Maybe that's more of a BigQuery use case then where you pay for usage?

Unfortunately it’s not a relational database, so no constraints or any of the other features.

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