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Comment by nop_slide | Hacker News Reader

Tangential, first time bumping into Xata. What is the difference between Xata and Neon?

Their site says

> Xata is the only serverless data platform for PostgreSQL.

I thought Neon was serverless postgres too?

Edit: This looks really dope actually, going to play around with it later. Really dig the free tier and the built in search from the get go.

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We're referring more to the "data platform" part. What we mean by a "Postgres data platform" (and arguably it's not an widely accepted term, so take it with a grain of salt) is that you get not only Postgres, but secondary data stores around it, more tightly integrated than in a typical cloud provider:

- Elasticsearch, to which we replicate data automatically via CDC

- Blob storage for file attachments, we use S3 to store the files and Cloudflare to cache them on CDN

- (in the future) Caching

- (in the future) Time-series databases, again with automatic replication from Postgres

That said, you can use just the Postgres part, and we are very happy if you do.

Edited my comment above, but this looks really rad. I made an account and going to try porting a side project DB to it later!

Particularly we need to improve our search and I've been lazy about tweaking our ts_vector setup.

> Elasticsearch

Do you use zombodb?

https://github.com/zombodb/zombodb

You can get an overview of the platform in this Post: https://xata.io/blog/serverless-postgres-platform#the-platfo...

Zombodb is a really cool project, but no, we don't use it. We use logical replication and triggers to also capture schema changes with your records into an event stream. The event stream is used to send your data to Elasticsearch (and create/update the index). See: https://xata.io/blog/serverless-postgres-platform#logical-re...

Stay tuned, we are planning to open source this component as well.

As far as Postgres goes, Xata is just Amazon Aurora under the hood if I read their last blog post right.

(I work at Neon)

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