Comment by efxhoy
2 years ago
Big congrats on 1.0! Super exciting project.
My dream scenario would be installing hydra as an extension into my main rails application database. My usecase is showing analytics numbers directly to users, like "how many people visited my listing", which regular row-level postgres is not suited to answer. To do this now we need a to get that data from our DW, which is slow for single queries, so we need a cache, which we need to keep in sync, which is complexity I don't want. It would be amazing if I could do user-facing analytics queries directly in my main app db.
What put me off after a quick scroll:
Installing the extension changes the default table type to be columnar. I don't want an installed extension to do that, my main workload is still row oriented oltp, I only want specific tables to be columnar and I don't want to change all my normal migrations to specify `USING heap`. IMO timescale does this really well, it's an extension, not a new database. At least that's how I would want it to be.
It also seems like you're trying to claim postgres foreign data wrappers as "hydra external tables", implying it's a new feature? Postgres does this (reading other databases and external files) out of the box and it feels sneaky to try and brand that.
Also the FAQ says "Hydra is not a fork." When the engine clearly is: https://github.com/hydradatabase/citus I realize you want to monetize this as a bigger platform and that's completely fair, but it strikes me as dishonest to deny the citus originins in the FAQ.
Thanks for calling these out, as these are just misunderstandings. We will certainly tweak the language around these.
- Installing the extension itself does not change the default table type, this is only the case on Hydra Cloud and our Docker image.
- "Hydra is not a fork" refers to the fact that Hydra did not fork Postgres; it is an extension. We have put in a lot of effort since forking Citus, but it's not our intent to hide that fact.
- Yes, "Hydra External Tables" is a productization around FDWs, there's more we want to do with it but it hasn't been our focus lately.
> - Installing the extension itself does not change the default table type, this is only the case on Hydra Cloud and our Docker image.
Ah cool, thanks! How would I go about adding the extension to my own "FROM postgres:15" Dockerfile?
> Installing the extension changes the default table type to be columnar.
that is not the case, hydra as a service sets the default table type. the columnar extension does not make any changes like that, it simply ("simply") adds columnar as an option.
I'm just an engineer, so I'll leave the other comments for others :)