Compute is not the only bottleneck with running analytics on your transactional DB, there is also storage bandwidth and costs. Which is why once you cross a certain scale, you will want to separate out your analytics use case. I've always been tempted to do analytics over my transactional DB, but knowing that eventually I will need to move it out, felt it's just simpler to separate it out from the start.
Since you're advocating for the opposite, who do you see as your potential customers? Specifically, where in the lifecycle their growth do you see Hydra fit? Is it more for early stage or medium scale companies that can benefit from getting started with analytics quickly or can it continue to cater (at reasonable cost!) as they cross terabyte/petabyte scale?
This is super cool and congrats!
Some questions - I understand all of these concepts but so far everything seems to be aimed at people way more immersed in this world than I, so pardon any dumb queries:
I have a small website I run. Everything is currently hosted on Fly.io (sjc) and I’m using Postgres as my main db. I’m about to add a whole bunch of features related to analytics and was dreading having to spend a week learning Clickhouse, so was just going to use Postgres until things get too big and slow to be useful.
Is Hydra aimed at folks like me? I see you guys are also hosted with Fly which is great but in the Virginia region. Am I out of luck unless I move my app to VA? Am I basically giving up my own Postgres instance and porting everything to Hydra?
Thanks for clarifying - your site kinda mostly covers this stuff but not entirely crisply so I’m a bit puzzled.
Hey there, congrats on publicly launching this after your work over the past months!
Having followed the project for a while now, I really scratch my head when looking at your pricing.
The entire innovation of the past decade in database land has gone towards decoupling storage and compute, driving query engines (like DuckDB) and file formats (like Iceberg).
Yet you force-bundle storage and compute in your pricing while also selling a serverless product.
What's the reason behind that?
Why do it in the first place?
How does your pricing work?
The 40/ 500 compute hours I get are included in the spend limit per tier (i.e. max 160 additional hours in Starter etc.) or completely separate?
Why are there member constraints on a database product?
How does that factor into cost/ map to SDL / reasonable team setups of people operating analytics projects revolving around a database like yours?
I have never seen such a limit with any other vendor and esp. when you wanna get a hold in the market/ have people start using Hydra for the specialized role it can provide, having a 2 person limit for the minimum tier if I wanna PoC this would likely be a show stopper tbh...
my team is currently looking into offloading some of our analytics data into a columnar database next year. hydra and clickhouse were the top ones on the list. would love a breakdown of how the two compare.
Current user of Timescale for events processing, with heavy use of materialized views for rolling aggregates.
Is this a use case that you think Hydra would be competetive on?
Kudos for the product launch. A bit curious on the product itself, to me the product seems similar to what Neon team does, except Neon doesn't touch the columnar/analytics and just focus on the rowstore. I'm wondering how do you position the product, if let say Neon team (after Databricks acq) decides to support the columnstore format?
I feel like my ideal would be something more hybrid. It's pretty rare that I have a table that I decide upfront should be columnar. It's a lot more common that I want occasional analytics-like queries on my regular tables to not take forever.
The homepage of this website does a bad job of explaining wtf Hydra actually does. Is it a database? Some type of serverless architecture? Ok analytics, but analytics about what, postgrs performance? Does 'analytics' mean that its for OLAP queries?
is this using pg_duck?
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Ory Hydra is a relatively high-profile project with a name collision, FYI.
Hello Joe, thanks a lot for hydra and pg_duckdb. I wanted to confirm that for self hosting hydra i have to generate a token from your platform? what data is shared with hydra for this case. We need to double check as our data has restriction of sharing.
> Visit http://platform.hydra.so/token to fetch the access token and paste it into the section above.