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Show HN: Hydra 1.0 – open-source column-oriented Postgres

269 pointsby coatuealmost 2 years ago
hi hn, hydra ceo here<p>hydra is an open source, column-oriented postgres. you can set up remarkably fast aggregates on your project in minutes to query billions of rows instantly.<p>postgres is great, but aggregates can take minutes to hours to return results on large data sets. long-running analytical queries hog database resources and degrade performance. use hydra to run much faster analytics on postgres without making code changes. data is automatically loaded into columnar format and compressed. connect to hydra with your preferred postgres client (psql, dbeaver, etc).<p>following 4 months of development on hydra v0.3.0-alpha, our team is proud to share our first major version release. hydra 1.0 is under active development, but ready for use and feedback. we’re aiming to release 1.0 into general availability (ga) soon.<p>for testing, try the hydra free tier to create a column-oriented postgres instance on the cloud. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dashboard.hydra.so&#x2F;signup">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dashboard.hydra.so&#x2F;signup</a>

31 comments

qeternityalmost 2 years ago
Ok so this is a Citus fork.<p>Where can I read about what the differences &#x2F; trade offs are? I don’t see anything in the docs.
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pellaalmost 2 years ago
Congratulations!<p>Can we expect support for gist, gin, spgist, and brin indexes sometime in the near future?<p>Based on the source code, it appears that they are not supported:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;hydradatabase&#x2F;hydra&#x2F;blob&#x2F;96056312e7c0f4135e31ce5380f4f7b4cfb7b42f&#x2F;columnar&#x2F;src&#x2F;backend&#x2F;columnar&#x2F;README.md?plain=1#L190">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;hydradatabase&#x2F;hydra&#x2F;blob&#x2F;96056312e7c0f413...</a><p><i>&quot;... Columnar supports `btree` and `hash `indexes (and the constraints requiring them) but does not support `gist`, `gin`, `spgist` and `brin` indexes.&quot;</i>
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therealwardoalmost 2 years ago
how does Hydra compare to Citus? <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.citusdata.com" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.citusdata.com</a>
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mlenhardalmost 2 years ago
Congrats on the launch!<p>For those who have not experimented with columnar based databases, I would highly recommend toying around with them.<p>The performance improvements can be substantial. Obviously there are drawbacks involved with integrating a new database into your infrastructure, so it is exciting to see columnar format introduced to Postgres. Removes the hurdle of learning, deploying and monitoring another database.
say_it_as_it_isalmost 2 years ago
Hydra Columnar is a fork from Citus Columnar c. April, 2022.
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hgimenezalmost 2 years ago
Always awesome to see folks moving Postgres forward. Congrats on the launch!
ryanb_wisealmost 2 years ago
Talked to OP last night and played around with it this morning. This is something I&#x27;ve wanted to see added to postgres for a long time, and couldn&#x27;t have been done by a nicer and more accommodating founder. Very excited.
edublancasalmost 2 years ago
Congrats on the 1.0 milestone!<p>A few months ago, we worked with the team to bring Hydra to Jupyter, you can check out the tutorial here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.hydra.so&#x2F;analyze&#x2F;jupyter">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.hydra.so&#x2F;analyze&#x2F;jupyter</a><p>JupySQL&#x27;s GitHub: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;ploomber&#x2F;jupysql">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;ploomber&#x2F;jupysql</a>
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zhendlinalmost 2 years ago
awesome project - and we tested Zing Data ( <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.zingdata.com" rel="nofollow noreferrer">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.zingdata.com</a> ) with Hydra to make really fast analytical queries on postgres scale to analytics users on mobile and so far have seen great results.
techwizrdalmost 2 years ago
This looks really impressive, and I&#x27;m excited to see how it performs on our data!<p>P.S., I think the name conflicts with Hydra, the configuration management library: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hydra.cc&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hydra.cc&#x2F;</a>
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anagrialmost 2 years ago
Congrats on the launch.<p>Curious, why not contribute to Citus? Why create a fork and have duplicated effort?
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kevincoxalmost 2 years ago
I would love to have the ability to define &quot;column groups&quot; in regular Postgres. For example most of the time I just leave the table row-oriented, but when trying to optimize performance of specific tables and queries I could tell postgres to store one or a handful of columns separately similar to a column oriented database. This would allow getting quite a bit of performance out of my database for the few cases in OLTP where I need to do some scans or searches. Even just breaking out some rarely used columns into a separate group could be quite nice for keeping the caches hot.
samgawalmost 2 years ago
From my initial 5 minutes of getting setup with an existing install, it&#x27;s all fairly easy.<p># Requirements<p><pre><code> - lz4 - zstd </code></pre> # Building<p><pre><code> git clone https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;hydradatabase&#x2F;hydra cd hydra&#x2F;columnar .&#x2F;configure make make install </code></pre> # Install<p><pre><code> CREATE EXTENSION IF NOT EXISTS columnar; </code></pre> The actual extension docs are at <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.hydra.so&#x2F;concepts&#x2F;using-hydra-columnar">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.hydra.so&#x2F;concepts&#x2F;using-hydra-columnar</a>
chrisjcalmost 2 years ago
Very out of touch with Postgres, but is there a native column oriented table type option in Postgres so that you choose either row-based or columnar in the CREATE TABLE DDL?
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joshgrayalmost 2 years ago
Congrats to the entire Hydra team on the launch! We (Artemis - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.artemisdata.io&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.artemisdata.io&#x2F;</a>) are stoked to be build with you as a partner to help data teams analyze data even faster!
mitchpatinalmost 2 years ago
super impressive performance improvements!<p>do most of your customers replicate their postgres database to Hydra for analytics jobs, or what&#x27;s the typical set up?
florianherrengtalmost 2 years ago
Can you add the extension to an existing database?
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dikeialmost 2 years ago
For a Postgres extension, there&#x27;s a strangely lack of documentation on how to add Hydra to an existing PG installation.
s-monalmost 2 years ago
This looks wild! Been looking for a good event based logs DB and didn’t want to go full clickhouse. This will do!
KingOfCodersalmost 2 years ago
How does it compare to Timescaledb? Performance? Features? (TSDB is my current Postgres data lake setup)
burcsalmost 2 years ago
This is really cool, just played around with it a bit but excited to do a deeper dive later. Nice work guys!
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zrizavi17almost 2 years ago
Such a game changer and useful alternative to legacy databases!
quadraturealmost 2 years ago
How are updates handled, is it doing a merge on read ?
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mch82almost 2 years ago
Is hydra compatible with the PostGIS extension?
mdanielalmost 2 years ago
I wanted to say thank you for using actual Open Source licenses. It&#x27;s gotten to where I treat any recent &quot;Launch HN&quot; or &quot;Show HN&quot; containing &quot;open source&quot; in the title as &quot;well, I wonder which crazy license this project is using&quot;
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wrowan33almost 2 years ago
Congrats on the success!
pajepalmost 2 years ago
can I ask if you guys take contributors?
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ushakovalmost 2 years ago
Are you funded?
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carlodalmost 2 years ago
Congrats guys!
afeiszlialmost 2 years ago
Really cool!
Iwan-Zotowalmost 2 years ago
&gt; to query billions of rows instantly<p>Rows? Rows?!? What&#x27;s the point to have columnar DB to query rows?
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