"The differences between OrioleDB and Neon" ( June 20, 2025 )
replyIt’s a different storage engine for Postgres
replyThe "cloud environments" part sounds like marketing fluff. "The cloud" is just someone else's servers after all. There's nothing special about it.
replyThat’s like saying a chair is just a tree that has been modified. Technically true, practically there are some very specific differences.
replyWhat are the relevant differences? I’m not as cynical as the parent commenter, but I’m also unclear about what OrioleDB is doing that is meaningfully “CloudNative”. From skimming the main page, it seems like it’s just doing storage differently, but so far I’ve seen nothing to suggest that difference is “leveraging cloud services” or anything else.
replyI am not familiar with this particular product but generally if you run on say AWS you either need to account for the greatly increased disk latency due to EBS being network storage or build provisions for local storage that is not necessarily unlimited, it is unclear what kind of disk controller it is attached to, etc. It could also mean optimizing for the AWS-specific CPU architecture. Or it could mean using S3 as storage which has yet different durability and consistency semantics compared to other storage systems. It might also mean optimizing for pricing of a given cloud provider in some way.
replyI agree that all of those things could be true, but I haven't read anything that indicates any special dependency on or knowledge of proprietary cloud systems. As far as I can tell, it's just going to use whatever disk/CPU you give it?
reply> There's nothing special about it
replyWait when you need to manage a bunch of servers yourself. Unfortunately, the solutions available are complex, and not something where you can simply points something to a server, or VPS, and have a quick total controlled kernel level solution. K8, sure, but even that is not on the same level. And when you then need to manage DB's, your often placing those outside K8. Most scalable solutions like CRDB (10m pay, required yearly "free" license approval), Yugabyte(half broken), TiDB ... have their own issues and again, do not tie into a complete managed cloud experience.
If you take a look at how storage is billed in cloud, you'll see a huge difference. Networked storage, e.g., EBS, provides durability and survives VM restart. But it is billed on IOPS. 200K IOPS is a piece of cake for today's NVMe. But a 200K EBS easily costs you thousands per month. High-end NVMe devices, unfortunately, are all instance-level storage, which means they are gone if you shutdown your VM.
replyIn this case, it seems to refer to their support for S3-compatible object storage as for persistence.
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