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Comment by franckpachot | Hacker News Reader

The article is a marketing promotion for Citus. They ignore Neon, a major innovation in distributed cloud storage solutions. They reduce Distributed SQL to key-value stores, when it is actually the only distributed architecture that preserves all SQL features (ACID, consistent reads, referential integrity, global indexes).

And the only fact about performance is a benchmark comparing elastic and resilient distributed SQL to non-HA Citus running on larger machines.

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Big parts of the article are pretty generic concepts and only mention other products as an example. Haven't heard of Neon yet. What does Neon do differently? Is there a good introduction/overview?

Good, fair and reproducible benchmarks are a rarity. Do you have any (independent) benchmarks that compare different distributed PostgreSQL-based solutions?

Here is a blog post that should be a good dive into the Neon storage engine. I work at Neon, and am happy to answer any other questions you might have.

https://neon.tech/blog/get-page-at-lsn

All benchmarks are biased because nobody does the same level of config tuning on different databases. But this GigaOm/Microsoft one is a joke. They run Citus with no replication on 12x16+1x32 vCores and the others on 14x16 vCPU (so 14x8 cores) with replication factor 3.

Without good benchmarks it's hardly possible to compare different products.

But I agree that this benchmarks seems questionable at best then. I usually only work with on-premise deployments, so I don't know the details of all the cloud offerings. People will probably judge products on what is available on the first few search results though.

I fail to see this as a marketing promotion though, it doesn't seem to have much bias.

Though I do agree calling distributed SQL as key value store inaccurate and maybe a bit inappropriate.

Neon is a very confusing name, and honestly needs to be changed to something that can be distinct in the marketplace.

I mentioned Neon because it is open source and the article says "Not OSS" for "DBMS-optimized cloud storage". Think of it as open-source Aurora https://neon.tech/

I think Neon is KDE's Linux distribution.

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