Why would anyone use this as opposed to using Postgres? The value prop of run-anywhere applies to Postgres as well. I see column store and index advisor as the two features but if I don't need these, is there any reason?
It's twice as fast as out of the box PG for most things, and up to 100x faster for reads, depending on what you're doing. So there's that.
Also, from a manageability, on top of the index advisor, there's also vacuum management, so it will figure out when the best time to do the garbage cleanup while minimizing impact on performance.
The 100x analytics seems due to columnar storage like with TimescaleDB, but how do you get improvements on the other things? Is it really faster on a database with good indexes?
It really is, yes. I can't go into a lot of detail on the "why" because it's not open source and the product team would murder me...but I highly encourage folks to try it for themselves. Nothing else convinced me until I did it for myself. :)
We use Postgres as a Datawarehouse, once AlloyDB Omni is stable there is virtually no reason for us not to use it.
Obviously, we use Postgres not for its performance but for its ergonomics, first class dbt support and unbeatable extension ecosystem. Now if you're telling, I get all that with no compromises whatsoever and with a 10-100x analytical query performance increase, I'd be crazy not to use it.
From my perspective, Postgres just keeps on giving.
We encourage folks to draw their own conclusions, but we have done comparisons and ours is more efficient and produces faster results. I only say test yourself because I can't give specific details of how/why, so don't take my word for it. :)
Also, from a manageability, on top of the index advisor, there's also vacuum management, so it will figure out when the best time to do the garbage cleanup while minimizing impact on performance.