There is a difference though - you don’t have a query language that makes it easy to do, and the actual technology pushes you to make a different more correct choice.

With the caveat that ddb extensively documents how you will get billed, down to the request size.

I'm all for the aws hate when it's deserved, but if you get screwed by it on billing, you didn't read.

> RDS hosts sitting around when you have no traffic, costing you huge sums for a service that is basically `apt-get install mysql-server` on top of EC2.

rds gives you automatic backups, automatic failover with DNS, easy upgrades, IAM authentication, an API for manipulating your database instances, and more.

As ceo it damages your company's credibility when you say it's just `apt-get install mysql-server`. Please do better.

I have built systems for deploying both Mysql and Postgres setups with backups and replication and failover, and while it's simple enough to do, describing RDS as "apt-get install mysql-server" is a gross oversimplification.

I'd roll my own again for many reasons, not least because AWS is ridiculously overpriced, but if you're first using EC2 and so already taking the costs of being on AWS I'd recommend people use RDS over rolling their own any day unless they're very familiar with what proper redundancy and backup strategies entails .

One of the things about a $29/mo RDS instance, though, is that if you're doing full table scans over a million rows, it's going to grind to a crawl and immediately alert you (not explicitly, but via the performance hit) that you're doing something wrong with indexing. Effectively, it's a hard budget cap, and that's super useful for budget-conscious organizations and individuals.

Does PlanetScale have functionality to provide budget alerts? Does it have the ability to speed-throttle calls that would require a budget increase to do effectively without further optimization, which effectively that CPU-capped RDS instance does de facto?

In other words, can I tell PlanetScale to cap my usage and throttle query speed if I exceed row scan limits, rather than blocking me entirely or charging my credit card more? If it doesn't yet have those capabilities, then I think it's fair to say it can easily be worse than an idle RDS host sitting around.

A high but predictable cost is completely different from an unpredictable cost risk wise.

Hopefully you are not running a company nor anything that involves risk taking.

That is wasteful too, but deterministically wasteful. You know exactly how wasteful you are being and how much it will cost.. no surprises.

After that comment, I hope you have a CTO who keeps you away from the engineering decisions.

This limitation prohibits the use of joins until a session parameter like 'set max_logical_reads to xxx' is available.