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Comment by anaccountexists | Hacker News Reader

I mean, if you don’t want to denormalize your data, you’re going to need to think about indexes in some capacity regardless (this is true for non-relational DBs like Dynamo and Mongo too).

"get the 10 latest comments on this market, plus the associated avatars" couldn’t be better suited to a relational DB. That’s a textbook use case that Postgres would be amazingly well suited to.

Also: remember with Firestone that you’re paying for redundancy and availability that’s entirely Google managed. Most DB offerings you work with on your own are significantly more hands on as far as recovery / backups / replication go.

Engineering time is usually more expensive than server costs when you’re a startup, so think about how much time it’d take to do it yourself before you decide to optimize your server costs over R&D costs.

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Yeah - totally agreed re: eng time > server costs; the db costs are the least significant part of the equation.

Fundamentally, I'm trying to optimize for something like "developer happiness as we build out lots of new features quickly". My dream workflow would look something like: take the Typescript types we've defined on the client, and shove that somewhere in the cloud; then later query to pull out exactly the data we need to render any particular view of our site (ala GraphQL)

AND I'd really like to not have to spend a lot of up-front time knowing exactly which indices to set up, or to figure out complicated migrations later. And I'd like to not think about hosting/managing replications, etc. Maybe that's too many asks, and I'm being too greedy! I'm just hoping that someone's solved this pain point already, and I just haven't heard about it.

Not a well-understood solution to me, but you may be interested in looking into FaunaDB. IIUC, It works by defining a GraphQL API and queries you want to use on it, and it will create the correct data structures behind the scenes to allow efficient queries of the form you've provided.

It is really new, though, from all I can tell.

We do something kind of similar, only in reverse, with Prisma and PostgreSQL (models are defined in Prisma and TypeScript types are automatically generated for use in the client). It's been a pleasant developer experience, though we do not have any realtime data needs yet (we just do basic polling for the few parts that need reactivity based on database updates). I wasn't aware of the Supabase realtime PG project which was discussed here, so thanks for bringing that to our attention!

Supabase developer here. If you're interested in realtime, be sure to mark your calendar for our upcoming launch week (we do this a few times a year.) It's the week of March 28 and you'll definitely be very interested in some of the stuff we're launching.

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