[mattlord]

Installing the time zone tables on a single instance is certainly not hard: https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/8.0/en/time-zone-support.ht...

The trickier part is orchestrating the ongoing management of that across a large dynamic fleet. And in this case, it was much more than simply loading the tables but about using them to support importing databases into PlanetScale: https://github.com/vitessio/vitess/pull/10102

I'll link to my other comment on the billing issue: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31509240

We've had to do some other changes to our MySQL fork as well that will show up there, but we'd love to not have any patches! We'd love to keep the patch set minimal (just as Amazon certainly does with RDS and Aurora). And I would certainly argue that Vitess, which is what we build PlanetScale around, is a meaningful piece of technology that pairs with MySQL to make a great database: https://vitess.io. You're of course free to disagree — and I wish you all the best as you work to build something great in the future.

[throwusawayus]

what other managed sql DBs charge based on rows read, regardless of whether they are on-disk or in-memory? honest question. i am familiar with a number of managed mysql and postgres products, and none of them bill this way that i have ever seen

and for the record, despite planetscale staffers repeatedly denigrating rds (your competitor) on hn, aurora’s patch set is not “minimal”

i do think vitess is cool for what its worth. i just think your managed db product has bananas billing and also is horrendously over hyped, and your ceo’s responses to criticism are very reminiscant of theranos or wework’s responses to same

[mattlord]

I doubt that anyone would claim their billing metrics are perfect. If you find some specific workload that's actually cheaper on another serverless database offering then we'd love to hear about it (we strive for transparent, generous pricing). If you don't think that CPU usage based pricing — which is typical for serverless offerings and e.g. is what Aurora serverless uses in Aurora Capacity Units (ACUs) — is charging you for reads of cached data then I've got some bad news for you. :-) You're almost certainly being charged for reading the "row" from the network, write-ahead-logging for it and other ACID/MVCC related overhead, writing it to block device, reading it from the block device, reading it from memory, writing it to memory, sorting and comparing [pieces of] it, and writing it back to the network — all of these things take CPU cycles. I find this argument to be entirely missing the point.

Pointing out that surely Amazon would like to keep their patch set to a minimum (there's a high cost in maintaining custom patches as you upgrade MySQL) is in no way implying that their patch set is small. Minimal means the minimum required for what you need, rather than being some point of pride.

I'm certainly not on here bashing any other offerings. Between the two of us, I only see one person trolling / bashing. :-) With that, I will leave you to your opinions which you are of course free to have. Best of luck.