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Relating to the article, better scaling. Saying run it on a bigger box is a very brute force way to optimize an application.

While they come up with some other tricks here, that's ultimately what's scaling postgres means.

If I imagine a better database, it would have native support for scaling, a postgres compatible data layer as well as first party support for NoSQL( JSONB columns don't cut it since if you have simultaneous writes unpredictable behavior tends to occur).

It needs to also have a permissible license

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What does permissible license mean? If you mean open source, no such database exists AFAIK. If you mean you can run it locally for free for dev purposes, on prem without telemetry etc, then Oracle is clearly the best option.

Compared to Postgres, Oracle DB:

• Scales horizontally with full SQL and transactional consistency. That means both write and read masters, not replicas - you can use database nodes with storage smaller than your database, or with no storage, and they are fully ACID.

• Has full transactional MQ support, along with many other features.

• Can scale elastically.

• Doesn't require vacuuming or have problems with XID wraparound. These are all Postgresisms that don't affect Oracle due to its better MVCC engine design.

• Has first party support for NoSQL that resolves your concern (see SODA and JSON duality views).

I should note that I have a COI because I work part time at Oracle Labs (and this post is my own yadda yadda), but you're asking why does no such database exist and whether anyone can make one. The database you're asking for not only exists but is one of the world's most popular databases. It's also actually quite cheap thanks to the elastic scaling. Spec out a managed Oracle DB in Oracle's cloud using the default elastic scaling option and you'll find it's cheaper than an Amazon Postgres RDS for similar max specs!

Does Oracle offer a Firebase like application/layer with authentication and stuff.

Can you get me some Oracle cloud credits ?

First positive thing I’ve ever heard about an oracle project !

Oracle Cloud (called OCI) has an always-free offering, you don't need credits. You can just sign up and use some small quantity of resources for nothing indefinitely. That includes a managed Oracle database:

https://docs.oracle.com/en/cloud/paas/autonomous-database/se...

There's also some sort of startup credits program with a brochure here, apparently you can just fill out a form and get some credits with an option to apply for more. But I don't know much about that. I've used the always-free programme for some personal stuff and it worked fine so I never needed to think about credits.

https://www.oracle.com/a/ocom/docs/free-cloud.pdf

I have to admit I'm not really familiar with Firebase, I thought that was some managed service for mobile apps, but Oracle DB comes with some stuff that sounds similar. And Oracle Cloud is an AWS-style cloud, it has a ton of high level services for things.

ORDS is a REST binding layer that lets you export tables, views, stored procedures and NoSQL JSON document stores over HTTP without writing a middleman server yourself. You can drive it directly from the browser. ORDS supports OAuth2 or can be integrated with custom auth schemes from what I understand. I've not used ORDS myself yet but probably will in the near future.

https://www.oracle.com/database/technologies/appdev/rest.htm...

Firebase IIRC when it first launched was known for push streaming of changes. Oracle DB lets you subscribe to the results of SQL queries and get push notifications when they change, either directly via driver callbacks or into a message queue for async processing later. It's pretty easy to hook such notifications up to web sockets or SSE or similar, in fact I've done that in my current project.

There's also a thing called APEX which is a bundled visual low-code app builder. I've never used it but I've used apps built with it, and it must be quite flexible as they all had a lot of features and looked very different. You can tell you're using an APEX app because they have a lot of colons in the URLs for some reason. Here's a random example of one from outside of Oracle that exports a database of dubious scientific research papers:

https://dbrech.irit.fr/pls/apex/f?p=9999:1::::::

I'm not holding it up as a great example, there are probably better examples out there, it's just a one that came to mind that's public and I used before.

Firebase, is basically a back-end server in a box. Authentication, check, file storage , check. Databases, check. Firebase functions which allow for complex logic written in JavaScript, check. Hosting, check. Supabase comes really close, but has been much more difficult in actual use.

I'm working on a fully open source game right now, and I can't ethically tell people to hook into a closed source service. But I must admit, having to use supabase instead of firebase has made this much harder than it needs to be.

Hm right well you can certainly write apps that run fully inside the database and use its services, so with ORDS doing OAuth2 I guess that gets close to something like Firebase. You can run logic written in JS easily too, it has an embedding of graaljs which is a fast JS engine that's well integrated with the rest of the database environment.

> Supabase comes really close, but has been much more difficult in actual use

supabase team here - can you share more about the challenges? We'd love your feedback so that we can fix any difficulties for the future

It's not just one thing, but it's much harder to use vs firebase.

For example, Firebase doesn't care about captchas for anonymous authentication. Supabase explicitly warns you to enable this before allowing anonymous authentication.

The problem here is not every client is going to be able to use captchas. You can't just enable it for new signups, but disable it for signing in.

If user XYZ used a captcha to register, they probably aren't a bot when they sign in later. Say they sign in using a game engine client. Unless I want to open up a webview a captcha won't work.

Honestly I might not be using Supabase correctly. Basically I'm working on a small open source card game. I created a very similar game in Firebase previously. I used the database to manage state and then wrote some basic logic in Firebase functions.

I'm not sure exactly why, but this has been much harder in Supabase. I will admit my SQL isn't the best, so maybe I'm just used to NoSQL...

Can you please expand on the JSONB unpredictable behavior? We are about to embark on a journey to move some of our data from MongoDB to postgres (with some JSONB). While we don't have significant concurrent writes to a table, would be very helpful to understand the issues

https://github.com/shrinerb/shrine/discussions/665

I've never personally encountered this, but I've seen other HN contributors mention it. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43189535

From what I can tell, unlike mongo, some postgres queries will try to update the entire JSONB data object vs a single field. This can lead to race conditions.

Ah, thanks. The first link seems something specific to Shrine. The bottomline is concurrent updates to different parts of JSONB need row level locking for correct behavior in Postgresql. This is not an important issue for us. Thank you for the pointers

You can trivially do it without locking using a version column.