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Comment by imveeve | Hacker News Reader

hi, this is Venkat from Rockset.

Good feedback. We thought about the different ways to frame the value prop and "serverless" is what resonated the most with us because: 1/ you can load data, process queries and build apps/dashboards without ever thinking about servers -- so, no provisioning or capacity planning required. 2/ you only pay for amount of data actually loaded and indexed -- so, no idle servers costing you $$$s.

If you have better suggestions that feels more accurate, please share and we will definitely consider it.

Touche on the "cloud hardware" bit. We will fix that soon.

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Hey Venkat! Thanks for replying in good humor.

Now that you explain your reasoning a bit, and upon re-reading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serverless_computing, I think using "serverless" in this context makes sense. I see "serverless" used so much more often to describe compute runtimes like AWS Lambda than databases that, I confess, I thought you might be trying to ride that wave's popularity; and/or that you might be using "serverless" _just_ because the servers were managed by you not the users, whereas you allocate capacity on a more granular level than the server.

I do still recommend you take out the "cloud hardware" bit ;D

Thanks for the explanation, and best of luck! Cool model.

thanks.

'cloud hardware' was definitely LOL worthy. ... brb after i go fix it :)

Based on my initial read of your website it looks like you are in the same space as ElasticSearch and LucidWorks, although you don't seem to have non-SQL text search capabilities. It would be interesting to see a performance comparison between the three using SQL. I could see some customers wanting an SQL focused solution if there are performance gains to be had.

[this is Venkat from Rockset]

Your assessment here is spot on @itronitron

Our schemaless data ingest + automatic indexing definitely draws a lot of inspiration from search based systems such as ES and Solr. And yes, the biggest difference here is that Rockset allows

1/ full featured SQL (with fast JOINS, aggregations, sorts etc) on such semi-structured data sets, and that

2/ it is built ground up to exploit cloud economics and scale (which is why we are able to offer this as a serverless data management system).

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