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Comment by marbemac | Hacker News Reader

First of all, this is great news - I use compose for Mongo and have been waiting for a PostgreSQL option. However, is the ram allotment similar to that given in the Mongo deployments - 1/10th storage? So, about $125/month for 1GB ram and 10GB storage. Making the obvious comparison to Heroku (which, granted, doesn't offer the autoscaling feature), Compose looks quite expensive. At a glance, it seems that on Heroku one gets the same amount of ram and 6 times the storage for less than half the cost of Compose.

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These are all on enterprise grade SSDs. At 10GB of storage, you likely have more raw IO capacity than you'd get on an EC2 instance with EBS. Right now, it's built for high performance Postgres users, not databases with a whole bunch of cold data and a minimal hot data set.

Ah I did not realize that it's not on EBS (aws announced SSD EBS last June so I thought perhaps you guys jumped on that opportunity). What's the max # of connections? Does it scale with storage as well?

We're tuning the connection limits during beta, but it's not something we typically scale. We set that as high as we can without hurting stability, and then let people shoot themselves in the foot if they want. :)

If you use it and run into connection limit issues, let us know and we'll gladly up them for you.

We don't apply any artificial limit on the number of connections, or the number of ops/s.

We scale on storage / memory, we try to keep the storage and memory scaling to a defined ratio for optimal performance

You might find the HikariCP guidance on connection pools with SSD interesting. Less disk waiting can mean a much smaller pool is optimal, to avoid unnecessary context switching, among other things.

https://github.com/brettwooldridge/HikariCP/wiki/About-Pool-...

People are paying $125/month for 1GB memory and 10GB space? I see how AWS is making so much money, those prices are just insane.

And DBA services, disaster recovery, redundancy, tools, etc. Sometimes it makes more sense to let developers run their own databases, or hire dedicated DB operations staff, but usually it doesn't. :D

I sense you've never worked in a suit & tie enterprise...

If you have backups, upgrade, access to monitoring tools, etc. 125$ / month is just 2 hours max of developer time.

That's a bargain and your standard Oracle admin should just feel threatened :-) (provided the company is willing to put its data on a server far away of its control room, which, I guess, doesn't happen so often :-))

so a bargain if you actually can make use of it...

It happens more than you would think. Big companies tend to have two classes of DB — the big special DB everyone uses, and then utility DBs (frequently hundreds or thousands) that devs use for smaller scale projects. They're usually pretty happy letting the tangential apps run elsewhere.

That's a bargain and your standard Oracle admin should just feel threatened

Pretty sure that's not the comparison folks are making. They're comparing it to Heroku, RDS, and self-hosting

People that use Oracle don't even read HN, it's another league.

Out of curiosity, what do they read?

It's probably more accurate to say that people who buy Oracle don't read HN. Developers that use Oracle might read HN, and these are the people that are driving the future of databases. There's a reason most new DBs have an open source business model. :)

People who buy Oracle are likely reading management publications, and possibly Gigaom. They're not reading technical discussions of databases.

For the same price you can get 4-8GB RAM and 10x the storage on RDS, AWS's managed relational database solution. However, Compose is going for a different performance profile, not the typical CRUD app.

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