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by Edwinr95 562 days ago
I find it to be super limited, and I'm sort of struggling to see the point given all these constraints.

No temporary tables, no foreign keys, no views, no more than 10k rows in a transaction.

Except for some basic wire compatibility with the postgres protocol, I'd hardly call this a "database", and more a key-value store.

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/aurora-dsql/latest/userguide/wor...

5 comments

Despite this number of limitations, I imagine that it's still far more usable from an application than DynamoDB for many use-cases. Adding Jsonb support would make it even more competitive for some.
Yep, people not seeing the usecase have not tried to build a serverless product on AWS and found themselves stuck between cheap, performant but denormalized ddb or whatever the fuck aurora serverless v2 is supposed to be.

I do not want to denormalize my data model, i do not have a high performance usecase, I simply want infrastructure that scales with usage (down to 0) and a flexible normalized model I can build more on top of easily.

DDB is great and all until you're asked to add 3 filters and orderby feature and suddenly you're adding elastic search to your project

Seems like it's mostly AWS' answer to Cloudflare D2, but using Postgres as the frame of reference instead of sqlite. (I'm not really sure what to call Postgres in this situation since it's so limited it's clearly not any full version of Postgres in any respect. Postgres-ish)
> Cloudflare D2

Not that it matters but it's D1 but I noticed people sometimes call it D2, maybe by analogy with R2.

What if Cloudflare is working on next version? D2
AWS tends to prioritize performance and scalability over functionality, which is reflected in the design of DynamoDB, SimpleDB, and now DSQL. I'm also not a big fan of this style. It doesn't give customers the flexibility to choose their own trade-offs like Spanner does and assumes that customers can't make these kinds of decisions on their own.
Oh yeah nowadays AWS believes more choices more footguns
I assume they've met my architects then.
Major "No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame." vibes.

This is the first release of something new and groundbreaking.

> Except for some basic wire compatibility with the postgres protocol, I'd hardly call this a "database", and more a key-value store.

Hopefully that keeps the pricing reasonable. :)

But seriously, for a smaller CRUD app, this could be sufficient, even "magical," if the price is right. For my part though, the lack of multiple databases per cluster puts multi-tenant systems completely off the table. Now that you mention it, I almost wonder if this is a giant hack on top of Valkey/Redis...

But a smaller CRUD app wouldn't need "virtually unlimited scale". I'm very curious what their target audience is.
I don't know, I manage a PHP app with about 10K users. If it doesn't cost much more, just paying to have the peace of mind that I never need to think about it again as my app grows, would not be a bad trade. This is assuming, of course, that the price is not extortionate.
In case it scales to Facebook's scale. Better safe than sorry.
I work with a lot of financial services applications, and they are most definitely in the "simple CRUD" with regards to the database realm, but with extremely high throughput and multiregional.

Having it be Postgres compatible is the big selling point.

Who else would use it? Not sure, gaming perhaps?

Possibly a game server? Between matchmaking, leaderboards, achievements, you'll never be updating 10k rows at once...
>the lack of multiple databases per cluster

I don't think that will matter. This feels much more like DynamoDB where you're charged for GB used/stored and no infra cost, so no reason to nest databases

Isolation can be quite important. I work with a micro services architecture, where we assign a database per service.

That makes it very easy to manage access to sensitive data.

You do not need logical database isolation if you have even stronger isolation with virtual clusters. The pricing and quota will be important factor for that use case.