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I’ve loved Neon and now I’m a little worried. Are there any alternatives?

[Disclaimer: I work for Xata]

As it happens, we've just launched our new Xata platform (https://xata.io/) which has some of the key Neon features: instant copy-on-write branching and separation of storage and compute. As an extra twist, we also can do anonymization (PII masking) between your production database and developer branches.

The way we do copy-on-write branches is a bit different. We haven't done any modifications to Postgres but do it completely at the storage layer, which is a distributed system in itself. This also brings some I/O performance opportunities.

While Xata has been around for a while, we're just launching this new platform, and it is in Private Beta. But we are happy to work with you if you are interested.

Btw, congrats to the Neon team!

Is this open source? A major point of Neon is that it's open source and self-hostable.

Several components are open source as their own projects (see below) which will allow you to reproduce most of the features on top of regular Postgres. But the storage part is not open source. We are considering a simpler implementation of it that would be realistic to self-host and still do copy-on-write branching.

These are the open source components:

* pgstream for the anonymization from the production branch

* pgroll for schema changes

* Xata Agent for the LLM-powered optimizations

I think when people look at Neon, the Aurora-style disaggregated compute/data architecture allowing highly scalable read replicas on cloud storage is the defining feature, and it's the only such project that offers it for Postgres. So the storage part is the point.

The PII masking aspect is very interesting and something we couldn't get when we decided on DBLab a month ago. What does the deployment model within AWS look like?

If you want to deploy the whole platform inside your own AWS account, we have a Bring Your Own Cloud model: https://xata.io/byoc

If you want to get anonymization from your RDS/Aurora instance and into Xata branches, then you run only a CLI command (`xata clone`) which does something similar to pg_dump/pg_restore but with masking. It is based on our pgstream open source project.

Happy to organize a demo any time.

1. Would you sign BAA (for HIPAA) for the Pay As You Go plan? Can't find that anywhere on your site except for that Lite is HIPAA compliant (https://lite.xata.io/security).

2. FYI, couldn't request access via the BYOC form so I sent an email as per the error: There was an error, please try again or contact us at info@xata.io.

1. Yes, we will sign BAA for Pay As You Go.

2. Thanks, I see you sent the email already, not sure why it failed. Will reach out over email.

Hi @tudorg - do the Xata copy-on-write branches work like Neon in that you effectively get an isolated Postgres cluster, allowing you to test roles, extensions, creating/dropping DBs, altering schema & data of existing DBs, etc? I looked in the docs but it wasn’t clear to me.

Yes, exactly, you get a new isolated Postgres database, just started from essentially a snapshot at the time of the fork. You can test any types of changes.

Great, thanks for confirming

Do you support http or websocket connections like https://github.com/neondatabase/serverless? In my experience neon is ultra fast that way in serverless environments like 1-5ms per query with network roundtrip.

We have support for SQL over HTTP in Xata Lite: https://lite.xata.io/docs/sdk/sql/overview

Any plans for websockets? Neon supports transactions over them.

Neon also supports anonymization: https://neon.tech/docs/extensions/postgresql-anonymizer as well as schema only branching

Hey!

(Disclaimer: I work at Xata.) Just wanted to mention that we also support anonymization, in case that’s something you're looking into: https://xata.io/postgres-data-masking

I’ve had good experiences with Supabase.

If all you care about is the forking aspect we use DBLab Engine pretty effectively: https://postgres.ai/products/dblab_engine. Gets deployed within your own infrastructure.

https://www.koyeb.com/docs/databases

Give Prisma Postgres a shot? https://prisma.io/postgres (I work for Prisma)

Supabase is your best bet.

geldata.com

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