Hacker News Reader

Comment by hdjjhhvvhga | Hacker News Reader

The Free Tier is completely irrelevant here, though. The very reason someone might use Spanner is its excellent scalability. I don't believe there is any reason to use it for smaller projects other than education. The customers who will use Spanners are those for whom CockroachDB is not enough, for example. For everybody with databases that are not that huge PostgreSQL will do just fine.

View on HN

> For everybody with databases that are not that huge PostgreSQL will do just fine.

Ha. Remember Gary Bernhardt of WAT fame? https://twitter.com/garybernhardt/status/600783770925420546

> Consulting service: you bring your big data problems to me, I say "your data set fits in RAM", you pay me $10,000 for saving you $500,000.

AWS will happily rent you a server with 24 TB of memory for about $200/hour.

Columnar databases typically get a 10:1 compression ratio over raw data = 240 TB effectively.

That’s a lot of data.

Which columnar databases are doing the above in-memory?

Kdb with ease, but down 500k on licenses and the cost of people who can use it. :)

SQL Server supports in-memory columnstore tables. I’m not an expert but I suspect SAP HANA also.

If you squint, any database engine is “in memory” if there is more buffer than data.

Or just use a RAM disk!

> If you squint, any database engine is “in memory” if there is more buffer than data.

That is sadly not true, I remember one lonely night debugging a MSSQL 2012 instance that was _very_ slow, and it turned out that for a simple query (one join, 100 rows in one table and 10 in the other, 100 result in total, one where clause) it forced writing the result to disk before evaluating the WHERE condition. Unable to fight the scheduler I've ended up making a ramdisk for this data.

Yes, tempdb spills can be annoying, but I believe they never occur for queries that use only in-memory tables.

Very true, but most people do not yet no about scale-to-zero pay-for-what-you-use sql server clouds with a free tier like CockroachDB and neon. They think that you must pay $5 a month to run a sql server, which has been the case until very recently, so they go with no sql options to get the free tier.

Edit: actualy Spanner looks like another CockroachDB. You use sql to interact with it. In which case I can see many people who would want to use this with a free tier for hobby projects. ie. in between education and production development.

> Edit: actualy Spanner looks like another CockroachDB. You use sql to interact with it. In which case I can see many people who would want to use this with a free tier for hobby projects. ie. in between education and production development.

Pedantically, cockroachDB is another spanner. It was made by Google devs who left Google having previously used spanner, and intentionally made something similar to spanner (ish, lots of handwaving happening here)

haha !!!. cockroachDB literally says, their motivation is spanner .. lol

FYI, Spanner came long before CockroachDB. Indeed, the founders of CockroachDB are Xooglers and Spanner was inspiration for the latter.

> actualy Spanner looks like another CockroachDB.

Yeah it does :). CockroachDB set out to be an open source version of Spanner by ex-Google engineers.

> Edit: actualy Spanner looks like another CockroachDB

lol

cockroachdb is an external reimplementation of some of the ideas of spanner but without depending on excellent clocks.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com