Tangentially related, is this book worth the hype? I don't read a lot of genre fiction, but don't like to miss out on the exceptional (just finished and loved Flowers for Algernon, as an example).
Edit: Sounds like an enjoyable, low commitment book. Will give it a try, thanks for the feedback.
I give credit to Andy Weir for knowing what The Martian did well--setting up a bunch of technical problems as load-bearing elements of a plot--and going and executing that same general plan, but with new particulars and bigger and with fun new ideas. The made-up sciencey stuff feels infused with principled ideas about how new things we haven't discovered might work, rather than designed for their role in the story alone. And he's willing to write an ending!
There are things he does not stand out at, but those don't take you out of the story. As people work through things on Earth a lot of the nontechnical parts are, I guess, simplified, but I can't care that much; I didn't pick this up wanting a bureaucratic or psychological thriller. And he (or he + early readers and editors) usually make sure to quickly and efficiently get you through all of that to the next fun part.
In my opinion Weir is learning to write in full public view. I tolerate it largely because he is definitely getting better. But its not everyones cup of tea.
The scenario is definitely contrived to introduce interplanetary travel to a near future setting.
The amnesia parts of of the book are not very coherently written.
However what Weir IMHO excels at is having fun self insert characters solving problems. When you get past the cruft and get to the "This is a book about troubleshooting in space" sections, it takes off.
The hype, absolutely not. I found the writing to be very poor. However I enjoyed it. The story is refreshing and straightforward.
To be fair, I read it months before the movie announcement and it really felt like reading a movie plot. If you prefer, I thought that the author had a great story idea but cared very little about writing a book, like he already knew this was for Hollywood.
I think with good production it’s going to be a better movie than the book.
Never read the Martian but I was told it was the same thing.
> Having been rebuffed by literary agents when trying to get prior books published, Weir decided to put the book online in serial format one chapter at a time for free at his website. At the request of fans, he made an Amazon Kindle version available at 99 cents (the minimum allowable price he could set).[9] The Kindle edition rose to the top of Amazon's list of best-selling science-fiction titles, selling 35,000 copies in three months, more than had been previously downloaded free.[9][11] This garnered the attention of publishers: Podium Publishing, an audiobook publisher, signed for the audiobook rights in January 2013. Weir sold the print rights to Crown in March 2013 for over US$100,000.[9]
Obviously subjective, but I had seen The Martian before I read the book (many years after seeing the movie), and liked the book way better than the movie. Read Project Hail Mary right after finishing The Martian, and enjoyed that one even more. I guess the writing is a bit dry, but it kind of makes sense and I quite like it. I'm cautiously optimistic about the new movie.
In my opinion, The Martian had better writing. You could tell Weir was having a blast writing it, and his enthusiasm translated directly to the main character's love of science and enduring sense of humor in the face of almost constantly dying.
Hail Mary felt like it was trying to capture the same magic but missed the mark. The plot felt constructed rather than spontaneous and I couldn't relate much to the main character at all. I agree about the Hollywood motive. I'll probably watch the movie.
> Never read the Martian but I was told it was the same thing.
That's the very feeling I had when I read 'The Martian'.
While I was reading it I actually thought something to the tune (It's been years now) "This reads like a movie".
Guess that explains why the movie is so faithful to the book.
Almost nothing is worth the hype but the book is an enjoyable page turner if you like space adventures and speculative science. Audiobook also got some extra attention, I'd go with that if you like audiobooks.
I enjoyed it a lot, especially the audio book. I'm not sure how much I would have enjoyed the print version. I can't say much more without spoilers, but the sound effects really make the drama come to life.
It was really enjoyable to read. And I also do not read a lot of fiction, with my last book being the Hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy series.
My verdict is that Project Hail Mary was way much more engaging in terms of story-telling. The concepts were cool, and tbh I look forward for the movie and see if the adaptation will be nice
If you don't read/like much genre fiction, I would say probably no. The pacing is well done and I genuinely find story compelling, but the writing while solid-ish is not exactly of high literary quality.
Additionally, in terms of genre I actually find Weir's books to be more like detective novels than sci-fi, though obviously lots of sci-fi elements in them.
I've found and some have proven that sci-fi is just a setting of sorts, a background to the story at hand. For instance the Backyard Starship series is 100% a detective / cop novel set in space. Asimov did one called The Naked Sun that was pretty much a murder mystery and from what I understand written to prove a point that sci-fi really is just a setting to what ever main genre you want out of it.
I have the same opinion, likewise for fantasy. But a lot of scifi and fantasy stories really have similar tropes and plots, even if it is possible to write say, a romantic book with scifi trappings. There are also some books like I, Robot that really are about the scifi and not just another genre in a scifi setting.
I also think anime is in the same boat, there is a ton of different stories you can tell and how they are animated. its a shame it gets all lumped together like it does
It's a fun read but, just like his other books, very one-dimensional characters with no depth. Not really remarkable literature, more of a bunch of Wikipedia articles strung together.
I agree that I really don't like Andy Weir's character writing: his dialogue in particular is rough, but despite normally characters being what I'm there for in stories, I give Project Hail Mary a bit more credit than this. The story has some interesting ideas and I think Weir's strength is the mystery of process: you see a challenge, and then you get to enjoy the competence porn of someone successfully going through the process of finding a solution, and I think he nails doing that in a really engaging way.
I do think the movie will probably end up better than the book: having a screenwriter go over the dialogue alone will do a lot, I think.
Project Hail Mary is light reading sci-fi. Which is fine, I enjoyed it, but if you are looking for something meatier, covering broader themes and character development, here's some other recent stuff (there's a lot of old stuff covered already in other comments):
Stories of Your Life and Others; Exhalation (Ted Chiang) - both are short story collections vs novels, though
Dissolution (Nicholas Binge)
Too Like the Lightning (Ada Palmer) and sequels (wordy, philosophical, interesting future society)
Tell Me an Ending (Jo Harkin) - more near-future and grounded
Yeah I was going to say the same thing. Pandora's Star/Judas unchained is the best scifi I've ever read. Peter F Hamilton's worldbuilding is unmatched.
scalzi is mil-sci-fi, which I also enjoy, but not man vs nature conflicts like weir writes about (even Artemis is largely about solving physical problems even if they arise from interpersonal conflict..)
There’s lots of answers to this depending on taste, but you also get into arguments about whether such and such is space opera or planetary romance. Children of Time is hard SF the way a reader from the 1960s would have understood it.
I second this -- but, at the same time, it's such a shame that Tchaikovsky hasn't written anything else worth a damn, despite writing something like three novels every year!
His two most recent, Shroud and Service Model, are bloated, uninspired, and borderline unreadable. I guess he's now subject to that curse of established authors, where editors are scared to mess with their manuscripts and trim the fat.
I second Daemon as an excellent sci-fi. I also really enjoyed Project Hail Mary and thought the characters weren’t too bad for a sci-fi.
Daemon isn’t about a rogue AI in the sense it was designed that way. Also you need to read the sequel “Freedom” to really get the true sci-fi philosophical message.
I personally enjoyed the sequel Freedom because it really explores the idea of a crypto-DAO like society that embraces human nature to build a more sustainable and fair society. It was ahead of its time as I don’t think DAO’s had been created yet.
Suarez’s later books also build on the themes in interesting ways.
I liked the audiobook a lot, but I'm a SF aficionado, so my opinion may not be relevant. The other comment may be correct about the "serious literary critic" opinion.
I enjoyed The Martian even more, but perhaps only because I wasn't prepared for how good it was. I was bored in Stockholm airport and thought "haven't I heard of this book oh HN?", flipped a few pages, and decided to buy it. It quickly became clear that I had a new favorite book (and it still is)
PHM, from the same author, I was very much expecting to be very good to amazing. It delivered, but it's a different feeling when you see it coming
Yes, it's a nice book. Especially if you are not a native English speaking and you are looking to practice your English reading skills. I enjoyed the book and so many of my friends. It's very easy read, and it falls under the hard sci-fi category.
I also enjoyed the expanse books!
I typically prefer somewhat deeper and more thought-provoking material, but I enjoyed this book. It’s a light page-turner, written-to-be-turned-into-a-movie type book. Overall, I would recommend it.
It's funny, I would not put this or the Martian into made-to-be-movie category, mainly featuring a single protagonist alone with his thoughts of how best to effect survival. I haven't (and probably won't) see the movies. I preferred the Martian very much compared to PHM, but I did enjoy it. Just had a problem with suspension of disbelief to do trivialization of language learning and communication (especially alien).
I liked all of them but i thought the length and the production for a PHM movie would be a lot. Compared to Artemis, no need for aliens, and a shorter read.
It was on my reading list for a while, and after the movie trailer was released, it finally nudged me and I read it. Took a few hours. It is very easy to read, quite enjoyable being a 'plausible' sci-fi. Though, spoilers ahead, alien part of the story was somewhat disappointing, by being not alien enough.
I thought it was a pretty good book as someone who reads a lot of sci-fi. It has a few unique ideas and plot points I haven't seen before, is an accessible read to anyone, and has a satisfying conclusion.
It’s not really good. It feels like the author was just trying to recreate the Martian and it was only written to be turned into a movie. It’s a book for people who don’t usually read. Everyone just talks about the audio book
Meh, to me it failed to engage. Characters very one dimensional, I’d call it young adult level sophistication . Some cool ideas though.
TBF I am trying to write fiction for the first time in my writing career, and I also suck at characters and non contrived story engagement, so I’m not trying to throw stones here. I do hope, however, to do better in my first published fiction.
It's maybe not a literary masterpiece and it's suspiciously similar to The Martian if you squint. But not many books can get me laughing out loud the second or third time through.
It's a really fun read and I find the aliens particularly compelling in a way that most Sci-Fi doesn't get right.
To make it shorter than OP's reply, from my understanding of the offerings:
- PlanetScale for predictable load. You pick a config (CPU, memory) and if you don't have traffic it sits idle, and if you have traffic it's limited by the config you picked.
- Neon for scalability. You pay for compute hours, so if your traffic is spikey (e.g. concert ticket sales), you don't pay for idle resources during low traffic, and get all the compute you need during high traffic.
I use Postgres on RDS. Our database is several TB and runs a 24/7 production app. It seems fine. (earnest question) Why should I look into either/both of these?
Except: "The active time includes periods when the database is receiving requests and for a duration (default 300 seconds) after the last request is received. Following this period of inactivity, the database scales down to zero, effectively pausing compute time billing."
So if you get at least one request every five minutes, neon will charge you for 24 hours of compute a day.
Long story short, I didn't want to make that analysis/distinction because it would miss the point.
They excel in their respective areas based on the architectural decisions they've made for the use cases they wanted to optimize for.
PlanetScale, with their latest Metal introduction, optimized for super low latency (they act like they've reinvented the wheel, lol), but they clearly have something in mind going in this direction.
Neon offers many managed features for serverless PostgreSQL that were missing in the market, like instant branching, and with auto-scaling, you may perform better with variable workloads. From their perspective, they wanted to serve other use cases.
There's no reason to always compare apples to oranges, and no reason to hate one another when everyone is pushing the managed database industry forward.
Easy to setup and instant forks for devs was it for me. Felt the pain with dev app state in the past and this took <20 minutes to migrate (beta users only) and go live, and get back to feature work.
I’ve learned (sometimes the hard way!) that every design choice comes with real trade-offs. There’s no magic database architecture that optimizes every dimension (e.g., scalability, performance, ease-of-use) simultaneously.
Social media often pushes us into oversimplified "winner vs. loser" narratives, but this hides the actual complexity of building great infrastructure.
Recognizing and respecting these differences makes us smarter engineers, better community members, and frankly, just more enjoyable people to chat with.
PS Thank you for helping me add a new book to my list :-)
I don’t get it. Sending a query to a remote server is going to be much slower than sending the query to local database. When has Postgres not been enough on its own?
For me it's all about the branching Neon provides. Being able to instantly and automatically have a branch of my production data for every dev branch is incredibly useful.
You can have an anonymized dump like you'd normally do and then branch it. This allows spinning up environments in seconds and without the disk footprint of a new replica or dedicated DB.
The privacy / security constraints stay the same whether you are branching or not.
Anonymizing data is the biggest part of such a workflow. Most prevalent use case that requires production data is for debugging. I guess there is some value in branching non-prod databases for feature development.
Most security teams do not allow prod data in non prod environments, anonymized or not l.
Tangentially related, is this book worth the hype? I don't read a lot of genre fiction, but don't like to miss out on the exceptional (just finished and loved Flowers for Algernon, as an example).
Edit: Sounds like an enjoyable, low commitment book. Will give it a try, thanks for the feedback.
I give credit to Andy Weir for knowing what The Martian did well--setting up a bunch of technical problems as load-bearing elements of a plot--and going and executing that same general plan, but with new particulars and bigger and with fun new ideas. The made-up sciencey stuff feels infused with principled ideas about how new things we haven't discovered might work, rather than designed for their role in the story alone. And he's willing to write an ending!
There are things he does not stand out at, but those don't take you out of the story. As people work through things on Earth a lot of the nontechnical parts are, I guess, simplified, but I can't care that much; I didn't pick this up wanting a bureaucratic or psychological thriller. And he (or he + early readers and editors) usually make sure to quickly and efficiently get you through all of that to the next fun part.
In my opinion Weir is learning to write in full public view. I tolerate it largely because he is definitely getting better. But its not everyones cup of tea.
The scenario is definitely contrived to introduce interplanetary travel to a near future setting.
The amnesia parts of of the book are not very coherently written.
However what Weir IMHO excels at is having fun self insert characters solving problems. When you get past the cruft and get to the "This is a book about troubleshooting in space" sections, it takes off.
The hype, absolutely not. I found the writing to be very poor. However I enjoyed it. The story is refreshing and straightforward.
To be fair, I read it months before the movie announcement and it really felt like reading a movie plot. If you prefer, I thought that the author had a great story idea but cared very little about writing a book, like he already knew this was for Hollywood.
I think with good production it’s going to be a better movie than the book.
Never read the Martian but I was told it was the same thing.
> Never read the Martian but I was told it was the same thing.
The Martian was actually originally published in a serialized form, one chapter coming out every so often.
> It didn't start out that way though. "The Martian" began as a series of self-published chapters on Weir's personal blog.
> Then Weir decided to put the book on Amazon, selling it for the website's lowest possible price ($0.99).
* https://archive.is/https://www.businessinsider.com/how-andy-...
> Having been rebuffed by literary agents when trying to get prior books published, Weir decided to put the book online in serial format one chapter at a time for free at his website. At the request of fans, he made an Amazon Kindle version available at 99 cents (the minimum allowable price he could set).[9] The Kindle edition rose to the top of Amazon's list of best-selling science-fiction titles, selling 35,000 copies in three months, more than had been previously downloaded free.[9][11] This garnered the attention of publishers: Podium Publishing, an audiobook publisher, signed for the audiobook rights in January 2013. Weir sold the print rights to Crown in March 2013 for over US$100,000.[9]
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Martian_(Weir_novel)#Publi...
Obviously subjective, but I had seen The Martian before I read the book (many years after seeing the movie), and liked the book way better than the movie. Read Project Hail Mary right after finishing The Martian, and enjoyed that one even more. I guess the writing is a bit dry, but it kind of makes sense and I quite like it. I'm cautiously optimistic about the new movie.
In my opinion, The Martian had better writing. You could tell Weir was having a blast writing it, and his enthusiasm translated directly to the main character's love of science and enduring sense of humor in the face of almost constantly dying.
Hail Mary felt like it was trying to capture the same magic but missed the mark. The plot felt constructed rather than spontaneous and I couldn't relate much to the main character at all. I agree about the Hollywood motive. I'll probably watch the movie.
> Never read the Martian but I was told it was the same thing.
That's the very feeling I had when I read 'The Martian'. While I was reading it I actually thought something to the tune (It's been years now) "This reads like a movie".
Guess that explains why the movie is so faithful to the book.
It was not at all originally intended to be a movie, it just translated to movie format very well, as some books do.
Its OK but if you want something the "Children of time" series byAdrian Tchaikovsky has a similarish story arch and is much better and deeper story.
Almost nothing is worth the hype but the book is an enjoyable page turner if you like space adventures and speculative science. Audiobook also got some extra attention, I'd go with that if you like audiobooks.
I loved the Audiobook.
I would almost say you should try to listen to the audiobook instead of reading it, as a unique experience
This. It was fun and very readable, but not something I have any desire to go back and read again.
It’s pretty good. Definitely got better at the end in my opinion. I am interested to see how it will translate to film.
Check out Dragon’s Egg while you’re at it. It’s like Project Hail Mary’s much nerdier older brother.
I enjoyed it a lot, especially the audio book. I'm not sure how much I would have enjoyed the print version. I can't say much more without spoilers, but the sound effects really make the drama come to life.
It was really enjoyable to read. And I also do not read a lot of fiction, with my last book being the Hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy series.
My verdict is that Project Hail Mary was way much more engaging in terms of story-telling. The concepts were cool, and tbh I look forward for the movie and see if the adaptation will be nice
If you don't read/like much genre fiction, I would say probably no. The pacing is well done and I genuinely find story compelling, but the writing while solid-ish is not exactly of high literary quality.
Additionally, in terms of genre I actually find Weir's books to be more like detective novels than sci-fi, though obviously lots of sci-fi elements in them.
I've found and some have proven that sci-fi is just a setting of sorts, a background to the story at hand. For instance the Backyard Starship series is 100% a detective / cop novel set in space. Asimov did one called The Naked Sun that was pretty much a murder mystery and from what I understand written to prove a point that sci-fi really is just a setting to what ever main genre you want out of it.
I have the same opinion, likewise for fantasy. But a lot of scifi and fantasy stories really have similar tropes and plots, even if it is possible to write say, a romantic book with scifi trappings. There are also some books like I, Robot that really are about the scifi and not just another genre in a scifi setting.
Yea that makes a lot of sense. The first Expanse novel (at least Miller’s storyline) fits here as well.
I also think anime is in the same boat, there is a ton of different stories you can tell and how they are animated. its a shame it gets all lumped together like it does
It's a fun read but, just like his other books, very one-dimensional characters with no depth. Not really remarkable literature, more of a bunch of Wikipedia articles strung together.
I agree that I really don't like Andy Weir's character writing: his dialogue in particular is rough, but despite normally characters being what I'm there for in stories, I give Project Hail Mary a bit more credit than this. The story has some interesting ideas and I think Weir's strength is the mystery of process: you see a challenge, and then you get to enjoy the competence porn of someone successfully going through the process of finding a solution, and I think he nails doing that in a really engaging way.
I do think the movie will probably end up better than the book: having a screenwriter go over the dialogue alone will do a lot, I think.
if Project Hail Mary isn't a good sci-fi book, what is a good one?
Project Hail Mary is light reading sci-fi. Which is fine, I enjoyed it, but if you are looking for something meatier, covering broader themes and character development, here's some other recent stuff (there's a lot of old stuff covered already in other comments):
Stories of Your Life and Others; Exhalation (Ted Chiang) - both are short story collections vs novels, though
Dissolution (Nicholas Binge)
Too Like the Lightning (Ada Palmer) and sequels (wordy, philosophical, interesting future society)
Tell Me an Ending (Jo Harkin) - more near-future and grounded
Void Star (Zachary Mason)
Peter F Hamilton has some great hard sci-fi novels like the Commonwealth series. Super nerdy with some interesting characters.
John Scalzi is probably my favorite sci-fi author for excellent characters. His “Old Man’s War” is genius.
Yeah I was going to say the same thing. Pandora's Star/Judas unchained is the best scifi I've ever read. Peter F Hamilton's worldbuilding is unmatched.
scalzi is mil-sci-fi, which I also enjoy, but not man vs nature conflicts like weir writes about (even Artemis is largely about solving physical problems even if they arise from interpersonal conflict..)
Children of Time
There’s lots of answers to this depending on taste, but you also get into arguments about whether such and such is space opera or planetary romance. Children of Time is hard SF the way a reader from the 1960s would have understood it.
I second this -- but, at the same time, it's such a shame that Tchaikovsky hasn't written anything else worth a damn, despite writing something like three novels every year!
His two most recent, Shroud and Service Model, are bloated, uninspired, and borderline unreadable. I guess he's now subject to that curse of established authors, where editors are scared to mess with their manuscripts and trim the fat.
I liked Daemon by Daniel Suarez, I read it many years ago but it’s more relevant now than ever (the story is about a rogue AI).
I second Daemon as an excellent sci-fi. I also really enjoyed Project Hail Mary and thought the characters weren’t too bad for a sci-fi.
Daemon isn’t about a rogue AI in the sense it was designed that way. Also you need to read the sequel “Freedom” to really get the true sci-fi philosophical message.
I personally enjoyed the sequel Freedom because it really explores the idea of a crypto-DAO like society that embraces human nature to build a more sustainable and fair society. It was ahead of its time as I don’t think DAO’s had been created yet.
Suarez’s later books also build on the themes in interesting ways.
Iain M Banks Culture series
The Mote God's Eye
Anything by Asimov
Also there's a lot of great short stories in this genre. For example the road not taken by Harry Turtledove
Asimov? Brilliant sci-fi but his writing is so dry that it makes eating a box of dry saltine crackers feel like porridge in comparison. ;)
Dune, Children of Time, Neuromancer and Blindsight.
for "sci-fi" that reads like fantasy, the Sun Eater series is really fun.
I just saw an Apple TV teaser for Neuromancer!
I would add Vernor Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky to these suggestions
Depends a lot what you are after, but look for writers like Dan Simmons, Arthur C Clark or Alastair Reynolds.
I liked the audiobook a lot, but I'm a SF aficionado, so my opinion may not be relevant. The other comment may be correct about the "serious literary critic" opinion.
The audiobook version is probably my favorite listen to date.
It's Space MacGyver, and does that very well.
It’s an awesome book and I’ve been dying to see how they’ll adapt it to a movie soon
I enjoyed The Martian even more, but perhaps only because I wasn't prepared for how good it was. I was bored in Stockholm airport and thought "haven't I heard of this book oh HN?", flipped a few pages, and decided to buy it. It quickly became clear that I had a new favorite book (and it still is)
PHM, from the same author, I was very much expecting to be very good to amazing. It delivered, but it's a different feeling when you see it coming
Admittedly I am a sci-fi fan, but I loved it so much. The science fiction aspects are not the best part.
Don't watch the trailer for the movie though, it's very spoiler-heavy.
If you can handle the terrible Gary Sue main character, it's a fun summer read.
Yes, it's a nice book. Especially if you are not a native English speaking and you are looking to practice your English reading skills. I enjoyed the book and so many of my friends. It's very easy read, and it falls under the hard sci-fi category. I also enjoyed the expanse books!
I absolutely loved it. It’s well structured. The science is well written, but not overbearing. Fun story.
I typically prefer somewhat deeper and more thought-provoking material, but I enjoyed this book. It’s a light page-turner, written-to-be-turned-into-a-movie type book. Overall, I would recommend it.
It's funny, I would not put this or the Martian into made-to-be-movie category, mainly featuring a single protagonist alone with his thoughts of how best to effect survival. I haven't (and probably won't) see the movies. I preferred the Martian very much compared to PHM, but I did enjoy it. Just had a problem with suspension of disbelief to do trivialization of language learning and communication (especially alien).
I liked all of them but i thought the length and the production for a PHM movie would be a lot. Compared to Artemis, no need for aliens, and a shorter read.
No. Any Weir anything is not going to break into the tier of exceptional. Its YA fiction level writing with a bit of science sprinkled in.
It was on my reading list for a while, and after the movie trailer was released, it finally nudged me and I read it. Took a few hours. It is very easy to read, quite enjoyable being a 'plausible' sci-fi. Though, spoilers ahead, alien part of the story was somewhat disappointing, by being not alien enough.
It is a super fast, super fun read.
The audio book is very very good.
I thought it was a pretty good book as someone who reads a lot of sci-fi. It has a few unique ideas and plot points I haven't seen before, is an accessible read to anyone, and has a satisfying conclusion.
Absolutely fantastic book.
It’s not really good. It feels like the author was just trying to recreate the Martian and it was only written to be turned into a movie. It’s a book for people who don’t usually read. Everyone just talks about the audio book
No, it’s not particularly good. I read about 120 books a year, 2/3 of which is genre fiction.
Definitely read The Martian if you haven’t already.
Meh, to me it failed to engage. Characters very one dimensional, I’d call it young adult level sophistication . Some cool ideas though.
TBF I am trying to write fiction for the first time in my writing career, and I also suck at characters and non contrived story engagement, so I’m not trying to throw stones here. I do hope, however, to do better in my first published fiction.
andy weir is the dan brown of this genre
Yes, absolutely.
It's maybe not a literary masterpiece and it's suspiciously similar to The Martian if you squint. But not many books can get me laughing out loud the second or third time through.
It's a really fun read and I find the aliens particularly compelling in a way that most Sci-Fi doesn't get right.
Please remove that spoiler.
Hm I feel like I jumped into the middle of something and don't understand the conclusion.
What's the beef between PlanetScale and Neon? Benchmarking, uptime, vibe coding?
The quote at the end doesn't really help me. Which one is good for what?
To make it shorter than OP's reply, from my understanding of the offerings:
- PlanetScale for predictable load. You pick a config (CPU, memory) and if you don't have traffic it sits idle, and if you have traffic it's limited by the config you picked.
- Neon for scalability. You pay for compute hours, so if your traffic is spikey (e.g. concert ticket sales), you don't pay for idle resources during low traffic, and get all the compute you need during high traffic.
I use Postgres on RDS. Our database is several TB and runs a 24/7 production app. It seems fine. (earnest question) Why should I look into either/both of these?
Except: "The active time includes periods when the database is receiving requests and for a duration (default 300 seconds) after the last request is received. Following this period of inactivity, the database scales down to zero, effectively pausing compute time billing."
So if you get at least one request every five minutes, neon will charge you for 24 hours of compute a day.
Edelman PR
Long story short, I didn't want to make that analysis/distinction because it would miss the point.
They excel in their respective areas based on the architectural decisions they've made for the use cases they wanted to optimize for.
PlanetScale, with their latest Metal introduction, optimized for super low latency (they act like they've reinvented the wheel, lol), but they clearly have something in mind going in this direction.
Neon offers many managed features for serverless PostgreSQL that were missing in the market, like instant branching, and with auto-scaling, you may perform better with variable workloads. From their perspective, they wanted to serve other use cases.
There's no reason to always compare apples to oranges, and no reason to hate one another when everyone is pushing the managed database industry forward.
Well, I imagine at least the emotional aspect of this squabble had more than a billion reasons injected via Databricks.
The discussion centers on speed and scalability. I recently used Neon in a project mainly because it was easy to setup.
Easy to setup and instant forks for devs was it for me. Felt the pain with dev app state in the past and this took <20 minutes to migrate (beta users only) and go live, and get back to feature work.
I agree with the overall sentiment of this post.
I’ve learned (sometimes the hard way!) that every design choice comes with real trade-offs. There’s no magic database architecture that optimizes every dimension (e.g., scalability, performance, ease-of-use) simultaneously.
Social media often pushes us into oversimplified "winner vs. loser" narratives, but this hides the actual complexity of building great infrastructure.
Recognizing and respecting these differences makes us smarter engineers, better community members, and frankly, just more enjoyable people to chat with.
PS Thank you for helping me add a new book to my list :-)
I don’t get it. Sending a query to a remote server is going to be much slower than sending the query to local database. When has Postgres not been enough on its own?
For me it's all about the branching Neon provides. Being able to instantly and automatically have a branch of my production data for every dev branch is incredibly useful.
Aren't there data security concerns with this?
You can have an anonymized dump like you'd normally do and then branch it. This allows spinning up environments in seconds and without the disk footprint of a new replica or dedicated DB.
The privacy / security constraints stay the same whether you are branching or not.
That is true.
Anonymizing data is the biggest part of such a workflow. Most prevalent use case that requires production data is for debugging. I guess there is some value in branching non-prod databases for feature development.
Most security teams do not allow prod data in non prod environments, anonymized or not l.
tldr; Supabase. XD