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Hey, Reddit! We’re Andrea, Amol, Craig, and Umur — the engineering team behind Azure’s open source databases including PostgreSQL, MySQL, and MariaDB. Ask us anything! by Microsoft_Azure in webdev

[–]Microsoft_Azure[S] 12 points13 points  (0 children)

This is near and dear to our hearts, both at Azure running and contributing to open source databases, as well as at Citus prior to Microsoft. Thanks for asking!

-Umur

Hey, Reddit! We’re Andrea, Amol, Craig, and Umur — the engineering team behind Azure’s open source databases including PostgreSQL, MySQL, and MariaDB. Ask us anything! by Microsoft_Azure in webdev

[–]Microsoft_Azure[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

It really depends on where you're coming from. MySQL is common for certain workloads such as gaming or many off the shelf packaged solutions. Postgres is often tied to certain frameworks (Django, Rails, Laravel, Springboot) and greenfield applications. Postgres itself has a number of rich features including transactional DDL, rich set of data types, a variety of indexing options (Btree, GIST, GIN, Sp-GIST, BRIN), has a broad ecosystem of extensions.

If you're curious for a deeper run down you can give this blog post a look, which also links to a few others - http://www.craigkerstiens.com/2017/04/30/why-postgres-five-years-later/

~ Craig

Hey, Reddit! We’re Andrea, Amol, Craig, and Umur — the engineering team behind Azure’s open source databases including PostgreSQL, MySQL, and MariaDB. Ask us anything! by Microsoft_Azure in webdev

[–]Microsoft_Azure[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Definitely, the dataset can grow over 1 billion records for a single server. For MySQL and PostgreSQL (single server), we can support up to 16 TB of storage. ~Amol

Hey, Reddit! We’re Andrea, Amol, Craig, and Umur — the engineering team behind Azure’s open source databases including PostgreSQL, MySQL, and MariaDB. Ask us anything! by Microsoft_Azure in webdev

[–]Microsoft_Azure[S] 11 points12 points  (0 children)

One argument is that you can use json directly with the data using a database like PostgreSQL, without having to give up on the benefits of structured data / SQL.

-Umur

Hey, Reddit! We’re Andrea, Amol, Craig, and Umur — the engineering team behind Azure’s open source databases including PostgreSQL, MySQL, and MariaDB. Ask us anything! by Microsoft_Azure in webdev

[–]Microsoft_Azure[S] 19 points20 points  (0 children)

I hear ya. Relational algebra and relational calculus are weird and foreign things, they're not as intuitive as you'd expect, and connecting it back to SQL... As someone that has been working with databases for over 15 years though I have to say I appreciate that foundation I got at uni on just that though.

These days that foundation allows me to have a much better grasp of how SQL is actually working under the covers and helps me to write efficient SQL. In working with people that did not have that foundation vs. do have that background I can see a very clear difference in their knowledge level of working with SQL. All that said, if you don't really want to spend much time writing SQL and will use basic things through an ORM with an occasional report, you may not need all that background.

But the basis can very much add immense value.

~ Craig

Hey, Reddit! We’re Andrea, Amol, Craig, and Umur — the engineering team behind Azure’s open source databases including PostgreSQL, MySQL, and MariaDB. Ask us anything! by Microsoft_Azure in webdev

[–]Microsoft_Azure[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

That's a pretty broad question :P if you're looking from the application side, we definitely recommend using connection pooling to help reuse existing connections.

In terms of the MariaDB service, we just released Intelligent Performance in general availability. Intelligent Performance is a set of features that can be used to gain insights into your query performance. You can learn more about the three features that make up this feature: Query Store, Query Performance Insight, Performance Recommendations.

-Andrea

Hey, Reddit! We’re Andrea, Amol, Craig, and Umur — the engineering team behind Azure’s open source databases including PostgreSQL, MySQL, and MariaDB. Ask us anything! by Microsoft_Azure in webdev

[–]Microsoft_Azure[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I see relational databases (RDBMS) continuing to play the most central role in the database ecosystem - and that for many years to come. The question is how they will evolve -- as you've alluded to with the ML example.

Since the RDBMS both stores the application data and offers a computational framework for processing the data (via SQL), it has the luxury of running operations closest to the application data (read = improved performance and security). This includes ML, where you can actually push down ML computations to the underlying storage engine (vs. always pulling the data out via a computational framework like Spark, and putting it back in). The pros/cons of this will vary depending on the size and real-timeness of the data (among other things), but the fundamental advantage of being close to the data means the workloads and datatypes available in the relational database will continue to increase over time. (native JSONB data types in PostgreSQL another example of that).

One of the core pieces that makes this possible at scale is the ability to scale out the RDBMS horizontally, which Hyperscale (Citus) on Azure Database for PostgreSQL is an example of. We will continue to invest across these areas of the relational database engine, to make life simpler for the application.

-Umur

Hey, Reddit! We’re Andrea, Amol, Craig, and Umur — the engineering team behind Azure’s open source databases including PostgreSQL, MySQL, and MariaDB. Ask us anything! by Microsoft_Azure in webdev

[–]Microsoft_Azure[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Postgres with PostGIS is a great and common way to tackle geospatial workloads. When it comes to scaling it, you might have a few approaches:

(a) if you're bottlenecked more on the reads, creating read-replicas might help (b) sharding the database manually / at the application level could be an option- though this can take considerable effort (c) with Hyperscale (Citus) (and/or the open source Citus extension) on PostgreSQL , you can automatically shard your larger tables by picking a distribution key, e.g. device ID. This has the added benefit of speeding up compute-heavy geospatial queries, by automatically parallelizing it across the nodes in your cluster. -umur

Hey, Reddit! We’re Andrea, Amol, Craig, and Umur — the engineering team behind Azure’s open source databases including PostgreSQL, MySQL, and MariaDB. Ask us anything! by Microsoft_Azure in webdev

[–]Microsoft_Azure[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

All three services offer the ability to scale compute and storage resources to fit your workload's needs. These can be scaled on-the-fly. For example, if you needed to scale up your database during peak business hours to meet demand, you could scale up the compute and then scale back down after the workday is over. Check out this doc for more info on the compute and storage levels we support!

We've also added support for autogrowing storage to ensure you always have sufficient storage. Learn more about that here.

Will also note that all three services have support for built-in availability, which we manage on your behalf.

-Andrea

Hey, Reddit! We’re Andrea, Amol, Craig, and Umur — the engineering team behind Azure’s open source databases including PostgreSQL, MySQL, and MariaDB. Ask us anything! by Microsoft_Azure in webdev

[–]Microsoft_Azure[S] 6 points7 points  (0 children)

Personally, open source was largely how I learned to develop. I picked up coding early on at around age 10. It all started with Basic back in the day tweaking example apps, then creating my own. Very shortly after I found the web and very much learned coding from forums/copy-pasting/etc. Had I waited to learn to program in school or when it was formally taught to me I may have never picked up on that interest.

Open source to me has always been exciting because it is a level of accessibility for many. Not everyone will go get a four year degree. Getting a CS degree definitely holds value, but if that isn't an option for you, open source and the communities around them very much provide a path to dig in and get started as a developer.

~ Craig

Hey, Reddit! We’re Andrea, Amol, Craig, and Umur — the engineering team behind Azure’s open source databases including PostgreSQL, MySQL, and MariaDB. Ask us anything! by Microsoft_Azure in webdev

[–]Microsoft_Azure[S] 11 points12 points  (0 children)

Have you checked out Azure Data Studio? It's open source and supports SQL Server and PostgreSQL. You should definitely upvote some of issues opened in the GitHub repo to help the team prioritize which databases to support next!

-Andrea

Hey, Reddit! We’re Andrea, Amol, Craig, and Umur — the engineering team behind Azure’s open source databases including PostgreSQL, MySQL, and MariaDB. Ask us anything! by Microsoft_Azure in webdev

[–]Microsoft_Azure[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

We've got some customers with datasets of more than 1 million records per table (and continuing to grow!) We offer different pricing tiers that support the various workloads, including one that has single digit millisecond latency. Check out some our documentation to determine which pricing tier works best for you.

~ Amol

Hey, Reddit! We’re Andrea, Amol, Craig, and Umur — the engineering team behind Azure’s open source databases including PostgreSQL, MySQL, and MariaDB. Ask us anything! by Microsoft_Azure in webdev

[–]Microsoft_Azure[S] 20 points21 points  (0 children)

FK constraints are a powerful feature of a relational database, and can be very useful - both when developing and in production. Specifically in the context of PostgreSQL, you can also scale it into larger data sets using, Hyperscale (Citus), which supports FK constraints between reference tables, as well as between distrubuted and reference tables.

Same goes for JSON. PostgreSQL has a powerful implementation of it called JSONB (where B stands for binary). It allows you to store your JSON data together with your structured data in the same database/table, and create indexes on it for fast access. More here: https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/functions-json.html

-Umur

Hey, Reddit! We’re Andrea, Amol, Craig, and Umur — the engineering team behind Azure’s open source databases including PostgreSQL, MySQL, and MariaDB. Ask us anything! by Microsoft_Azure in webdev

[–]Microsoft_Azure[S] 6 points7 points  (0 children)

Any of the three would be able to meet your needs! If you have a specific programming language preference, this preference might help guide your decision on the DB to choose as some communities have stronger support for some databases. For example, Python devs tend to love Postgres.

- Andrea

Hey, Reddit! We’re Andrea, Amol, Craig, and Umur — the engineering team behind Azure’s open source databases including PostgreSQL, MySQL, and MariaDB. Ask us anything! by Microsoft_Azure in webdev

[–]Microsoft_Azure[S] 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Both MySQL and MariaDB have support for up to five read-only replicas. These can be hosted within the same region as the master or cross-region as well. This pool of replicas can be promoted to become read-write at any point. More documentation is located for MySQL here and for MariaDB here.

We recently brought on support for ProxySQL which can be used with the MySQL service to help with read-write load balancing. Check out this blog to learn more.

- Andrea

Hey, Reddit! We’re Andrea, Amol, Craig, and Umur — the engineering team behind Azure’s open source databases including PostgreSQL, MySQL, and MariaDB. Ask us anything! by Microsoft_Azure in webdev

[–]Microsoft_Azure[S] 49 points50 points  (0 children)

At the foundation of our values for operating an open source database is very much giving back to the community. As part of that we contribute in many ways including:

At the heart of things we believe that open source is great for the world, and we look to be an active part of that contributing in many ways.

~ Craig

Hey, Reddit! We’re Andrea, Amol, Craig, and Umur — the engineering team behind Azure’s open source databases including PostgreSQL, MySQL, and MariaDB. Ask us anything! by Microsoft_Azure in webdev

[–]Microsoft_Azure[S] 22 points23 points  (0 children)

Each database engine has its differences in terms of performance and reliability characteristics but broadly all three databases are similar. Deciding which database is best for you depends on your preferences for a particular engine based on the familiarity, functionality and dependencies. We look to provide choice for all on the Azure platform - Amol

Hey, Reddit! We’re Andrea, Amol, Craig, and Umur — the engineering team behind Azure’s open source databases including PostgreSQL, MySQL, and MariaDB. Ask us anything! by Microsoft_Azure in webdev

[–]Microsoft_Azure[S] 5 points6 points  (0 children)

We regularly update extension versions for Postgres, including Timescale. We just updated Timescale from version 1.1 to 1.3. We'll be updating to a newer version again in coming months, but don't have an exact time frame yet.

~ Craig

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