Neki – Sharded Postgres

Folks, in your launch posts remember to describe what you're launching and what it's for. Ideally in the opening paragraph.

- Intro: Explains problem but not what is Neki or what it's for.

- Why Neki: Explains alternatives and why they suck but not what is Neki or what it's for.

- How does Neki work: Describes the technical components but not what is Neki or what it's for.

- What you get beyond sharding: Explains how to run/deploy but not what is Neki or what it's for.

- What is a platform preview + Try Neki today: 140 words on the definition of "preview" and links to get started... but not what is Neki or what it's for.

Edit: The landing page has 100x more useful information up front -> https://neki.dev/

Edit #2: They've since added a "What is Neki" section. Good reaction time.

I love the offer which is running on the "PlanetScale Metal".

They claim to provide unlimited IOPS (I/O operations Per Second).

I would like to get some of these drives myself. Sounds like a technical miracle.

On the other hand claiming such miracles makes me wonder which other aspects in this are are actually a working miracle or rather a mythos/false marketing claim.

The top concern I've gotten from dev teams when proposing HA distributed postgres (e.g through RDS Aurora global) is that eventual consistency is not suitable for many workloads.

Does Neki solve for this, and if so how? My understanding of CAP theorem is that this basically requires some compromises around availability, but I'm curious as to what that looks like in practice here.

I love how the Planetscale CEO has been shitting on multigres[0], Supabase's equivalent to Neki, and gloating about how superior Neki is, and yet Neki is not even open source!

Sam, it feels like you're just playing games. It's hard to take anything you say or do seriously. Are you going to OSS this thing? Or have you decided to backpedal?

Congrats on the checks notes closed launch, I guess?

0: https://github.com/multigres/multigres

Kinda ironic that Planetscale built their company on open source Vitess that google built

And now planetscale have made a Vitess like equivalent for Postgres which they have made proprietary

I need this for my side project that has zero users, but I wonder if Neki will scale well enough.

I love to see this but as a heavy Vitess/MySQL user I do fear the split focus from PlanetScale. Hoping to see continued improvements on the Vitess side as well.

Selfish doubts aside, congrats to Planetscale on the launch!

Is this going to be open sourced? I thought this was the plan at the start. But ow I am confused.

How are cross-shard joins and transactions handled? Are there query patterns that would require application changes despite using the same drivers and ORM?

Man, I was deep into this blog post before I was able to answer the question "what is Neki?".

I am on a 12 Muni right now that is plastered with a Neki ad, and I looked up neki.dev literally 10 mins ago to see what this product is about. Did they time the release of this bus ad with the launch date?

Neki is a sharded Postgres implementation. It introduces one level of indirection between the application and the Postgres shards.

Found this from neki.dev.

How does Neki compare to https://pgdog.dev/?

So apparently the neki router uses many parts of Postgres. But is it open source itself?

Apparently not.

The first question came to my mind was, how would this compare against Citus.

Not even freeware/shareware?

A C2 level diagram included in the blog post would be helpful. What are the drawbacks to using Neki aside from the obvious (new software has bugs)?

Nice work by the marketing department getting two posts on HN front page at same time.

Pretty exciting to see a sharded Postgres product in the market.

The pitch is compelling. I wonder how many teams will be able to operate sharded database setups in production as a result of this.

Obviously welcome more tools for Postgres and sharding but it’s a tough hill to climb against the hyper clouds. Best wishes to the team.

I see no mention of foreign keys, or any other constraints, across shards. If, as I suspect, they're not implemented, it would still be useful but at the level of Spanner 10 years ago.

is this open-sourced?

I think this will become the new standard.

Cool, but we're on MySQL - anything similar available? Percona XtraDB?

Independent of the product, love the branding design for this page.

What does this compete with? Google Cloud SQL?

It's not Open Source Software. So, I'm not even interested. Lol

Will this be open source at some point?

Site design is tight. I like it.

only planet scale? Rookie numbers.

I am looking for interdimensional and interuniversal scale. Which of you trust fund babies has a startup which is working on this problem?

can we choose read-after-write consistency at query time, if needed?

The tech might be amazing, but the CEO comes across as an asshole

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