Comment by tudorg | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tudorg | Hacker News Reader

Hi everyone,

I am Tudor, CTO at Xata.

Thanks for posting the link! We’re not yet ready for you to try it out, so it is maybe a bit too early to show it to this community. We will probably do a proper Show HN post once we are ready.

Nevertheless we are thrilled to be here! :)

For a few more details, see also our first blog post: https://www.xata.io/blog/hello-world/

We’re building a database service that is extremely easy to use (think of Airtable and its rich data types), yet providing the usual guarantees offered by traditional databases (consistency, transactions, constraints). We also have a built-in analytics and search engine, so you no longer have to copy the data from the DB to the search engine. There are other features that we’re really excited about (native branches, easy-to-use joins, caching, security rules), but we’re going to be able to talk a lot more once we’re ready for users.

We’d love your feedback and if you’d be interested to work with us, please don’t hesitate to reach out.

@tudorg

Excited to see another player join the field. DBaaS seems to be rapidly evolving and it looks like there will be a lot of new developments in the next few years to help reduce the overall dev effort.

My apps need wafer thin business logic and most of the server apis that I write are just thin wrappers around the db query and auth.

As a hopeful JAMStack dev, i don't want to work on a server at all. My expectation is that the service should provide me the server and the db together

I just want to create a SPA/PWA and link it directly to the service provider apis.

Just adding my wishlist, in case it helps

- Rest api with user defined endpoints (or a single endpoint with function name as params)

- functions layer before the db queries

- globally available/provisionable db

- exportable db data to prevent lockin

- OSS auth implementation that can be taken anywhere

- integration with Oauth providers like Google, Apple, Github, Twitter etc.

- Protection and Analytics built in

- Competitive Pricing

Right now, I am not getting on the JAMSTACK wagon, because I am not finding a lot of SaaS provider which caters to all my needs. Firebase, Supabase and nHost, are the only ones which come to mind which can do what I hope should become common place in the market.

ooc, where does Google Firestore fall short?

You have a very impressive list of investors and angels.

One thing I have realised recently is that, even when someone has a good product, you have be to be very strategic with fundraising in Devtools and enterprise space. Doing it really well is an art and I think you guys are executing really well on that front. Good luck!

I was wondering when did you guys actually start before you came out of stealth mode.

Very excited to see someone is tackling this problem. With the rise of serverless, it's super easy for an average developer or a new developer to build a backend. It's also super easy to deploy a front-end with Vercel, Netlify, or GitHub Pages. But I believe there's no easy solution for the database part yet.

For most people, the most common choice is to use Firebase. Firebase offers services that people can use to build a "full-stack" application, from front-end service, serverless function as a backend, and a database. It's very tempting to use Firebase for a new developer. Now we also see the rise of Supabase, that offers an alternative to Firebase, that's built on top of open source projects.

I believe in the future, it should be the norm to include database to an application with just a single env variable, without worrying about anything else.

> I believe in the future, it should be the norm to include database to an application with just a single env variable, without worrying about anything else.

I some how doubt it. Firebase (and these kind of proprietary services in general) are a complete nightmare for larger production apps: limited query power, doesn't actually scale like it claims it does, difficult to test locally, etc.

A traditional backend with a Postgres database and plain REST APIs using hosted on something like Heroku is much simpler.

Hey tudorg, Really sorry if I posted this prematurely to HN... Came across the product on Twitter and it is an attempt to solve an incredibly common problem that me (and others in this community) break our heads around quite often!

Really looking forward to play around more with the product and I'm already on the waitlist :)

No worries :), and I'm glad that you did. It serves as good validation that we're working on something useful. We will be in touch to give you early access.

Xata looks neat! A few queries, if I may:

Is it NoSQL / NewSQL?

Distributed by default?

Global? serverless apps run at the edge. The database (or its read-copies at least) then could not oceans away? see: macrometa.com / workers.dev kv

Based on any open source backend like Postgres or OpenSearch? see: rocketset.com / quickwit.io / timescale.com

Will it have a free-tier?

Any tentative launch dates?

Thanks.

Thanks for the questions.

> Is it NoSQL / NewSQL? > Based on any open source backend like Postgres or OpenSearch?

Yes, we are basing our implementation on Postgres + Elasticsearch. However, we don't plan to offer direct access to the Postgres/ES APIs, so we see them as an implementation detail (an important one, of course). We will have our own API which will allow us to develop features like no-downtime migrations, branching, and caching.

> Will it have a free-tier?

Yes, absolutely! And we plan to make it in such a way that it will be production ready and all you need for a personal project or simple website.

>We will have our own API which will allow us to develop features like no-downtime migrations, branching, and caching.

Please please use an industry standard layer like Graphql. Otherwise it becomes very very hard to push for adoption here.

Just to elaborate on the downvotes: it's really not 'industry standard' to connect to your database over GraphQL. I'm not saying nobody is doing it, or that it doesn't work well (for all I know, it might), but it's certainly not an 'industry standard'.

You may want to look up https://prisma.io/ may for your use-case.

Hey there! Congrats on the landing page, it looks very promising.

As for the database and search engine, are you building on top of existing systems a unified API? i.e. are you building a smart layer on top of PostgreSQL for DB and Elastic for search?

Thanks!

That's right, see also my answer to the sibling comment.

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