Alternatives
Products that do what Penca – branchable, versioned OLTP+OLAP on one open copy of your data does
Hi HN! This is an early proof of concept of a branchable, versioned OLTP + OLAP database that runs on a single, open copy of your data in object storage. If you are familiar with Databricks' LTAP (https://www.databricks.com/company/newsroom/press-releases/d...) announcement from June, you can think of this as aspiring to be a fully open source, Apache 2.0 LTAP alternative with additional data versioning/auditability guarantees that enable audit, as_of queries, and (eventually) revert straight out of the box. How it works: 1. Writes land in vanilla postgres…
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- 2BP
Hi HN! We're Evgeny and Arjun, and we’re building a better way to do analytics with Postgres. We love Postgres for its simplicity, power, and rich ecosystem. But engineers have to still get bogged down with heavyweight and expensive OLAP systems when connecting an analytics data stack. Postgres is amazing at OLTP queries, but not for OLAP queries (large data scans and aggregations). Even in this case, we’ve still heard from countless scaling startups that they still try to use only a read replica to run analytics workloads since they don’t want to deal with the data engineering complexity of…
2024 · github.com
- 3IO
2024 · github.com
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- 5OO
Hey HN! Over the past few months, I've been working on building Omni - a workplace search and chat platform that connects to apps like Google Drive/Gmail, Slack, Confluence, etc. Essentially an open-source alternative to Glean, fully self-hosted. I noticed that some orgs find Glean to be expensive and not very extensible. I wanted to build something that small to mid-size teams could run themselves, so I decided to build it all on Postgres (ParadeDB to be precise) and pgvector. No Elasticsearch, or dedicated vector databases. I figured Postgres is more than capable of handling the level…
Mar 2026 · github.com
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- 7SO
Hello! For the past year I’ve been working on a fully-managed data warehouse built on Clickhouse. I built this because I was frustrated with how much work was required to run an OLAP database in prod: re-writing my app to do batch inserts, managing clusters and needing to look up special CREATE TABLE syntax every time I made a change. I found pricing for other warehouses confusing (what is a “credit” exactly?) and worried about getting capacity-planning wrong. I was previously building accounting software for firms with millions of transactions. I desperately needed to move from Postgres to…
2023 · github.com
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- 9DV
From the company behind Dolt—the world's first fully versioned database—comes DoltgreSQL, which implements PostgreSQL's variant of SQL. DoltgreSQL is at a very early stage, and we have quite a lot of work left to do, but we'd love to hear all thoughts and opinions! You can read more in the announcement blog post: https://www.dolthub.com/blog/2023-11-01-announcing-doltgresq...
2023 · github.com
- 10HF
2018 · github.com
- 11H1
hi hn, hydra ceo here hydra is an open source, column-oriented postgres. you can set up remarkably fast aggregates on your project in minutes to query billions of rows instantly. 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 making code changes. data is automatically loaded into columnar format and compressed. connect to hydra with your preferred postgres client (psql, dbeaver, etc). following 4 months…
2023 · hydra-so.notion.site
- 12SP
This is a MVP for Serverless Postgres. 1/ It uses Fly.io[0], which can automatically pause your database after all connections are released (and start it again when new connections join). 2/ It uses Oriole[1], a Postgres extension with experimental support for S3 / Decoupled Storage[2]. 3/ It uses Tigris[3], Globally Distributed S3-Compatible Object Storage. Oriole will automatically backup the data to Tigris using background workers. I wouldn't recommend using this in production, but I think it's in a good spot to provoke some discussion and ideas. You can get it running…
2024 · github.com
- 13HO
hi hn, hydra ceo here 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. demo video (5 min): https://youtu.be/1yzxgb0Oyrw github repo: https://github.com/hydradatabase/hydra 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. postgres is great, but…
2023 · hydra.so
- 14TO
Features Spreadsheet-like interface All you want is here • Cell Editing: Directly click and edit content within cells. • Formula Support: Input mathematical and logical formulas to auto-calculate values. • Data Sorting and Filtering: Sort data based on a column or multiple columns; use filters to view specific rows of data. • Aggregation Function: Automatically summarize statistics for each column, providing instant calculations like sum, average, count, max, and min for streamlined data analysis. • Data Formatting: formatting numbers, dates, etc. • Grouping: Organize rows into collapsible…
2024 · github.com
- 15HA
Hey HN, it’s been just over a year since we launched HelixDB (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43975423), a project a friend and I started in college. It’s an OLTP graph database built on object-storage, with native vector search and full-text search (FTS). Why graph, vector and FTS? Graph databases provide a natural cognitive model for data, vectors allow for a semantic understanding of the entities and relationships in the graph, and FTS provides more specific filtering. Many AI-driven applications attempt to combine all of these functionalities by stitching together…
Jun 2026 · github.com
- 16PC
This is an experimental extension for CRDTs, pg_crdt: GitHub repo[0]. It supports Yjs/Yrs and Automerge. The linked blog post [1] describes how we're thinking about this extension in a Supabase context. I want to emphasise this part: "pg_crdt has not been released onto the Supabase platform (and it may never be). We’re considering many options for offline-sync/support and, while CRDTs will undoubtedly factor in, we’re not sure if this is the right approach." [0] GitHub repo: https://github.com/supabase/pg_crdt [1] Blog post:…
2022 · supabase.com
- 17HO
Hey HN, we want to share HelixDB (https://github.com/HelixDB/helix-db/), a project a college friend and I are working on. It’s a new database that natively intertwines graph and vector types, without sacrificing performance. It’s written in Rust and our initial focus is on supporting RAG. Here’s a video runthrough: https://screen.studio/share/szgQu3yq. Why a hybrid? Vector databases are useful for similarity queries, while graph databases are useful for relationship queries. Each stores data in a way that’s best for its main type of query (e.g.…
2025 · github.com
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- 19DO
One year ago I open-sourced my very first 'real' project and shared it here. I was a college student in my senior year and desperately looking for a job. At the time of sharing it i couldn't even afford a domain and naively let someone buy the one i had my eyes on lol. It's been a hell of a year with this blowing up, me moving to another country, and switching 2 jobs. In a year we somehow managed to hit 26k stars, grow a 1000+ person discord community, and support 37 languages. I couldn't be more grateful for the community that helped this grow, but now i don't know what direction to take…
2025 · drawdb.app
- 20PS
Hello HN, I am Sai Srirampur, one of the Co-founders of PeerDB. (https://github.com/PeerDB-io/peerdb). We spent the past 7 months building a solid experience to replicate data from Postgres to data warehouses. Now we're expanding to queues. PeerDB Streams provides a simple and native way to replicate changes as they happen in Postgres to Queues (Kafka, Redpanda, Google PubSub, etc). We use Postgres logical decoding to enable Change Data Capture (CDC). Blog post here: https://blog.peerdb.io/peerdb-streams-simple-native-postgres.... 10-min quickstart here:…
2024
- 21VS
Hey HN! We’re Emma and Chris, founders of Velvet (https://www.usevelvet.com). Velvet proxies OpenAI calls and stores the requests and responses in your PostgreSQL database. That way, you can analyze logs with SQL (instead of a clunky UI). You can also set headers to add caching and metadata (for analysis). Backstory: We started by building some more general AI data tools (like a text-to-SQL editor). We were frustrated by the lack of basic LLM infrastructure, so ended up pivoting to focus on the tooling we wanted. So many existing apps, like Helicone, were hard to use as power…
2024 · usevelvet.com
- 22OO
Hi HN, Today we’re excited to introduce OLake (github.com/datazip-inc/olake, 130+ and growing fast), an open-source tool built to help you replicate Database (MongoDB, for now, mysql and postgres under development) data into Data Lakehouse at faster speed without any hassle of managing Debezium or kafka (at least 10x faster than Airbyte and Fivetran at fraction of the cost, refer docs for benchmarks - https://olake.io/docs/connectors/mongodb/benchmarks). You might think “we don't need yet another ETL tool”, true but we tried existing tools (proprietary…
2025
- 23SS
May 2026 · github.com
- 24LS
Some time ago, I was implementing saves for my LOVE2D game. I wanted to do a full dump of the game state -- which included closures (AI), complex graphs, sets with tables as keys and also fundamentally non-serializable data (coroutines and userdata), that require user-defined serialization/deserialization logic. I went through every Lua serialization library -- none covered all data types/cases. So I wrote my own. It is a polished version, thoroughly annotated, tested and documented. It is made to be as functional and customizable as possible (or at least I did everything I could…
2025 · github.com
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