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Show HN: Hydra - Open-Source Columnar Postgres

122 pointsby coatueover 1 year ago
hi hn, hydra ceo here<p>hydra is an open-source extension that adds columnar tables to Postgres for efficient analytical reporting. With Hydra, you can analyze billions of rows instantly without changing code.<p>demo video (5 min): <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;1yzxgb0Oyrw" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;1yzxgb0Oyrw</a> github repo: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;hydradatabase&#x2F;hydra">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;hydradatabase&#x2F;hydra</a><p>For 1.0 GA release, aggregate queries are over *60% faster* than Hydra beta due to aggregate vectorization. Spatial indexes (gin, gist, spgist, and rum indexes) and pg_hint_plan are now enabled for performance optimization.<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 changing code.<p>for testing, try the hydra free tier to create a column postgres instance on the cloud. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dashboard.hydra.so&#x2F;signup">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dashboard.hydra.so&#x2F;signup</a>

13 comments

mlenhardover 1 year ago
Congrats on the 1.0 Release, big milestone.<p>I&#x27;m personally really excited about all of the recent tooling for postgres aggregates. Definitely a pain point for a lot of developers and its easy to fall in trap where things work fine in the beginning and then query times explode as requirements change and the dataset grows. Nice to not have to spin up another DB in order to solve the problem as well.
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cjonasover 1 year ago
What&#x27;s the workflow for leveraging this extension in real-time for an existing database?<p>Say I wanted to use this to create a high performance &quot;aggregation&quot; API of my existing &quot;write heavy&quot; tables.<p>Is there a way to keep a `heap` &amp; `columnar` table in sync?<p>(relative Postgres noob here)
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garysahota93over 1 year ago
I&#x27;ve been using Hydra for the last ~2 months &amp; genuinely love it. The team is really talented &amp; it&#x27;s so great to see the progress they&#x27;ve been making. Congrats on the 1.0 GA release! Huge step!
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iepathosover 1 year ago
Nice tool, only unfortunate name, consider changing it. Already very well know security tool named hydra <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;vanhauser-thc&#x2F;thc-hydra">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;vanhauser-thc&#x2F;thc-hydra</a> been around since 2001. Then facebook went ahead and named their config tool hydra <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;facebookresearch&#x2F;hydra">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;facebookresearch&#x2F;hydra</a> on top of it. Like we get it, hydra popular mythology but we could use more original naming for tools
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efxhoyover 1 year ago
Big congrats on 1.0! Super exciting project.<p>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 &quot;how many people visited my listing&quot;, 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&#x27;t want. It would be amazing if I could do user-facing analytics queries directly in my main app db.<p>What put me off after a quick scroll:<p>Installing the extension changes the default table type to be columnar. I don&#x27;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&#x27;t want to change all my normal migrations to specify `USING heap`. IMO timescale does this really well, it&#x27;s an extension, not a new database. At least that&#x27;s how I would want it to be.<p>It also seems like you&#x27;re trying to claim postgres foreign data wrappers as &quot;hydra external tables&quot;, implying it&#x27;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.<p>Also the FAQ says &quot;Hydra is not a fork.&quot; When the engine clearly is: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;hydradatabase&#x2F;citus">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;hydradatabase&#x2F;citus</a> I realize you want to monetize this as a bigger platform and that&#x27;s completely fair, but it strikes me as dishonest to deny the citus originins in the FAQ.
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pellaover 1 year ago
Congratulations!<p>Please also add this info :<p>#1. to the pgsql-announce list: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.postgresql.org&#x2F;search&#x2F;?m=1&amp;ln=pgsql-announce&amp;q=hydra" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.postgresql.org&#x2F;search&#x2F;?m=1&amp;ln=pgsql-announce&amp;q=h...</a> &quot;Your search for hydra returned no hits.&quot;<p>#2. to the <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;planet.postgresql.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;planet.postgresql.org&#x2F;</a>
adultSwimover 1 year ago
Watch out. There used to be another Hydra project, a data repository with rich linked metadata, that changed its name after legal threat over trademark from Hydra Corporation. Now it&#x27;s called Hyku, <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hyku.samvera.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hyku.samvera.org&#x2F;</a><p>I hope you choose to defend your name.
coatueover 1 year ago
Should have mentioned, if you want to chat about open source, analytics, or meet some of the Hydra team swing by our event in SF this Thursday: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;partiful.com&#x2F;e&#x2F;gowvDVdnNcBLKUzfGOPv" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;partiful.com&#x2F;e&#x2F;gowvDVdnNcBLKUzfGOPv</a>
mdanielover 1 year ago
some previous discussions:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=37247945">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=37247945</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=36987920">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=36987920</a><p>and a relevant observation is that there are actually multiple license files in the repo so the consumer should read their explicit licensing section of the readme &lt;<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;hydradatabase&#x2F;hydra#license">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;hydradatabase&#x2F;hydra#license</a>&gt; since the GitHub sidebar is misleading
nitinreddy88over 1 year ago
Congratulations. @coatue, it would be great if you can share your email to reach out for Licensing details. I did fill up your form in site, but never received any response
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I_am_tiberiusover 1 year ago
I have 2 questions.<p>1. Is this optimized for constantly adding and removing rows to the columnar table?<p>2. Is this supported by Microsoft Azure Flexible Server for Postgres?
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giovannibonettiover 1 year ago
&gt; For 1.0 GA release<p>You may want to check that box in the README, assuming it is already done.
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winridover 1 year ago
How does sharding work? Can I use this with citus to scale horizontally?