from Hacker News

Azure Database for MySQL and PostgreSQL

by willyyr on 5/10/17, 3:46 PM with 99 comments

  • by sbuttgereit on 5/10/17, 6:26 PM

    What looks compelling about the PostgreSQL offering as compared to AWS RDS is that it looks like you get a PostgreSQL cluster rather than a single database in a shared cluster. At least reading the documentation for creating a DB implies that (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/postgresql/quickstart...).

    For me, it might remove some blockers to moving some clients to a cloud managed database solution that had always been there with AWS RDS. If that follows through and pays off for having a proper PostgreSQL super user in the database environment available for use (what I really want), that can make certain things much more do-able (brings new things you have to watch out for, too, but... pick your battles).

  • by sandGorgon on 5/10/17, 7:05 PM

    Unfortunately, still not available in the India datacenter.

    This is going to be huge in India. Microsoft has massive mindshare in India with the govt because of the regulatory landscape.

    I have it on firsthand info that several banks in India are going to make their first ever transition to the cloud on Azure because of Microsoft's willingness to go the extra mile around whatever security dances that the banks want them to do.

    Plus Azure has India datacenter which takes of the PII problem for healthcare and financial data.

    It is truly unfortunate that the management console has the worst UX ever.

  • by caleblloyd on 5/10/17, 6:06 PM

  • by pianoben on 5/10/17, 5:27 PM

    Better late than never - this is a welcome alternative to Amazon's RDS support for postgresql, the lack of which has been the primary reason I've kept personal workloads off of Azure. I'm excited to take this for a spin!

    Azure SQL Server has been great at work; operationally, it couldn't be simpler, and the point-in-time restore feature saved our bacon at least once. The only drawback has been... SQL Server itself. It's a solid performer, but T-SQL is a bear to work with. If MSFT can apply the same operations magic to postgres, they'll have a real winner on their hands.

  • by yilu331 on 5/11/17, 12:42 AM

    Please add/vote what are most critical PostgreSQL extensions you want to have in Azure Database for PostgreSQL. https://feedback.azure.com/forums/597976-azure-database-for-...

  • by philliphaydon on 5/10/17, 6:04 PM

    This is absolutely great news.

    Just a word of warning, plv8 extension isn't available in the preview:

    https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/postgresql/concepts-e...

    Apart from the lack of that extension, ah so exciting. <3 PostgreSQL.

  • by justinclift on 5/10/17, 5:20 PM

    Wow. If someone had suggested this would happen last year, I would have said pigs would fly first.

    /me looks outside for flying pigs. Yep, there they are, whole groups of them going by in formation. ;)

  • by insulanian on 5/10/17, 5:27 PM

    RDS was the main reason I stuck with AWS all this time. Happy to see MS recognizing that PostgreSQL is very much preferred these days.

  • by abrookewood on 5/11/17, 5:24 AM

    Just a word of caution: be very careful to check the latency between the DB tier and the VM tier.

    We had to abandon a multi-month deployment to Azure because the latency was too high and it caused all sorts of issues with our app. To be honest, our DB access approach wasn't great (heaps of really small requests), but we couldn't re-architect it in the timeframe we had. We were also doing this in Sydney, so maybe it was just a localised issue (the Australian data centres are relatively new).

    Anyway, hopefully they have that sorted - we need more competition!

  • by rattray on 5/10/17, 5:51 PM

    Honestly, I'm flat-out impressed by what I'm seeing from Azure these days.

  • by kamathsun on 5/11/17, 12:52 AM

    Please read my blog about Azure Database for PostgreSQL here -https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/announcing-azure-data... /I work at Microsoft on the managed PostgreSQL service/

  • by gressquel on 5/10/17, 5:24 PM

    great stuff from Microsoft this. Now people can run Wordpress on azure withouth install mysql on a seperate instance.

  • by barking on 5/10/17, 5:25 PM

    "Azure Database for PostgreSQL"

    Postgresql database for Azure?

  • by shontnew on 5/10/17, 6:09 PM

  • by lmickh on 5/10/17, 6:24 PM

    So is a "compute unit" the same as the "Azure Compute Units" that are used to measure VMs? 800 ACU roughly comes out to 4 cores. At $0.78/hr, that is hardly comparable to the RDS offerings. Didn't see an indication of memory.

    Much like SQL Server DTUs and DWUs, the spacebucks measurements only seem to useful for hiding the actual price comparisons.

    At least they stopped the DTU/DWU non-sense for these services.

  • by tlear on 5/10/17, 9:14 PM

    Nice, starting new project and this looks like the way to go for us. Postgres <3 Need to check if available in Japan yet

  • by ankushio on 5/10/17, 5:48 PM

    The landing page says "With Azure Database for PostgreSQL, you can scale the performance of your database with no application downtime". I don't see an option to scale the Postgres database in my Azure Portal.

    Is this feature not available yet?

  • by phlai on 5/11/17, 12:55 AM

    Its exciting to see Azure grow its offering to compete Amazon and Google.

  • by kaeshiwaza on 5/11/17, 4:15 PM

    A quick try show me that it's very very slow... Like 1s for a very simple query on a quite small database. I tried from a scaleway server (in France).

  • by denois on 5/11/17, 5:10 AM

    Good news. AWS is way too complex for startups. Azure is much simpler and don't require a separate DevOps department :D

  • by kaeshiwaza on 5/11/17, 6:23 AM

    Is it possible to create a replicate user and then replicate to a local server ?