[brianolson]

"as little as $65 USD/month" for GCP Spanner

vs AWS Free Tier:

"25 GB of data storage ... 2.5 million stream read requests ..."

https://aws.amazon.com/dynamodb/pricing/

So, there's probably somewhere the lines on the graph cross, but Google's headline seems misleading.

[hdjjhhvvhga]

The Free Tier is completely irrelevant here, though. The very reason someone might use Spanner is its excellent scalability. I don't believe there is any reason to use it for smaller projects other than education. The customers who will use Spanners are those for whom CockroachDB is not enough, for example. For everybody with databases that are not that huge PostgreSQL will do just fine.

[chx]

> For everybody with databases that are not that huge PostgreSQL will do just fine.

Ha. Remember Gary Bernhardt of WAT fame? https://twitter.com/garybernhardt/status/600783770925420546

> Consulting service: you bring your big data problems to me, I say "your data set fits in RAM", you pay me $10,000 for saving you $500,000.

[jiggawatts]

AWS will happily rent you a server with 24 TB of memory for about $200/hour.

Columnar databases typically get a 10:1 compression ratio over raw data = 240 TB effectively.

That’s a lot of data.

[RhodesianHunter]

Which columnar databases are doing the above in-memory?

[jiggawatts]

SQL Server supports in-memory columnstore tables. I’m not an expert but I suspect SAP HANA also.

If you squint, any database engine is “in memory” if there is more buffer than data.

Or just use a RAM disk!

[folmar]

> If you squint, any database engine is “in memory” if there is more buffer than data.

That is sadly not true, I remember one lonely night debugging a MSSQL 2012 instance that was _very_ slow, and it turned out that for a simple query (one join, 100 rows in one table and 10 in the other, 100 result in total, one where clause) it forced writing the result to disk before evaluating the WHERE condition. Unable to fight the scheduler I've ended up making a ramdisk for this data.

[mianos]

Kdb with ease, but down 500k on licenses and the cost of people who can use it. :)

[Vt71fcAqt7]

Very true, but most people do not yet no about scale-to-zero pay-for-what-you-use sql server clouds with a free tier like CockroachDB and neon. They think that you must pay $5 a month to run a sql server, which has been the case until very recently, so they go with no sql options to get the free tier.

Edit: actualy Spanner looks like another CockroachDB. You use sql to interact with it. In which case I can see many people who would want to use this with a free tier for hobby projects. ie. in between education and production development.

[dmoy]

> Edit: actualy Spanner looks like another CockroachDB. You use sql to interact with it. In which case I can see many people who would want to use this with a free tier for hobby projects. ie. in between education and production development.

Pedantically, cockroachDB is another spanner. It was made by Google devs who left Google having previously used spanner, and intentionally made something similar to spanner (ish, lots of handwaving happening here)

[catch22l]

haha !!!. cockroachDB literally says, their motivation is spanner .. lol

[bananapub]

> Edit: actualy Spanner looks like another CockroachDB

lol

cockroachdb is an external reimplementation of some of the ideas of spanner but without depending on excellent clocks.

[foobazgt]

FYI, Spanner came long before CockroachDB. Indeed, the founders of CockroachDB are Xooglers and Spanner was inspiration for the latter.

[RcouF1uZ4gsC]

> actualy Spanner looks like another CockroachDB.

Yeah it does :). CockroachDB set out to be an open source version of Spanner by ex-Google engineers.

[catch22l]

oh cmon. this is just 50 QPS. i mean yea obviously for someone having as little as 50QPS is not going to bother with the massive scale and availability in cloud spanner. there are a TON of applications today reaching 100M+ users in just a month. you are not dealing with 50QPS. oh and you forgot the crazy byte boundaries in DynamoDB. if you go over a single byte above 1kb, you are charged 2 Read units !

[ajross]

That seems nitpicky. The free tier is a marketing program, not a product.

"Google should offer intro discounts" is IMHO a very valid point (absolutely no idea why this doesn't exist), but it doesn't really speak to whether or not the real product is more or less expensive.

[avereveard]

it's a bit different because the free tier for dynamodb is not like the other 12 month limited offer, it's marketed as free forever, so it's not just an intro product, it's something you can run a small business off for free.

[catch22l]

for 50QPS and if you dont cross 1kb read or write. try to do a 2kb payload and see the QPS drop to 20