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Comment by talldatethrow | Hacker News Reader

I wrote my first self taught LAMP based miniSaas a few years ago. It has 34 paying companies using it with about 400 users total daily.

I want to write another soon. A free webapp saas type for consumers let's say.

Is there a reason I should learn this product instead of just continuing with modern mysql methods that seem to work and seem secure enough?

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If your current stack is working for you, that's great. The main advantages of Fauna vs say MySQL are going to be:

- Fauna is distributed and multi-region and therefore more resilient to hardware or regional outages (for example we barely noticed the last AWS us-east outage, except for the fact that it affected customer traffic to Fauna).

- You gain a lot of flexibility in terms of where and how you deploy your compute layer. Fauna works very well in concert with serverless platforms or edge-based compute like Cloudflare Workers. It's also possible to connect directly from your client/front-end, using Fauna to enforce end-user permissions.

- Even if you know SQL, it's worth checking out FQL. Simple queries in SQL are also easy in FQL, but more importantly, FQL gives you much greater control over the shape your query result, meaning you don't need an ORM to reconstruct your object graph. If you have ever used GraphQL, the experience is similar. Or you can see a few examples and comparisons with SQL on our FQL product page: https://fauna.com/fql

Is your primary objective to expand your experience and knowledge, or is it to ship product that delivers user value?

Obviously the answer is to deliver user value.... But at the same time, better performance is valuable to a user. So if this new, whatever it is I don't even know, will perform better at an atleast noticable metric, then it does deliver value to the user. If all it does is make MY life easier, then it's basically worthless to me IMO.

How much of a problem is performance right now, has anyone mentioned it to you? Has it gotten worse?

I often think about perf as thresholds. It's not totally accurate but if you have reasonable perf, generally going to lightning turbo / "Please the HN crowd because we hate bloat" isn't going to move the needle.

With 400 daily users in the CRM, mysql is not a problem at all. The only problem I have is loading huge tables sometimes without using pagination, but that's from a connection speed problem to the user not a mysql problem. Sometimes the table makes it towards 10+ megabytes and thats a bit goofy.

My question was more based on should I learn the new tech, or any new tech, if I'm now building something I hope will have atleast several thousands daily active users.

Deep down I know the answer. It's pretty obvious mysql won't have problems even for a million users for most types of sites.

If your high end user estimate is in the thousands, scaling is less of an issue. If users haven't mentioned frustration with latency, it's probably not a problem.

That said, you still have to feed your creativity and curiousity. I try to carve out time for "not totally necessary but skill growth and potentially impactful" time.

I happened to be sitting in front of a JavaScript book as you wrote that.

I finally opened it. I was always curious if I should learn js/node to replace PHP and maybe even get away from server side rendering in php. Right or wrong, from what I've read I think I can put that to rest for now. I see just as many issues with doing things in JS as PHP. Just spending a few hours of reading let my brain move on from that curiosity for now.

Good tip you gave. Thanks

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