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It says gel is to Postgres what typescript is to JavaScript, so can I add gel to an existing Postgres instance and get the benefits of the nicer query language or does it rely on special tables? If I use some other extension like timescale is that compatible with gel?

And is there a story for replication/subscribing to queries for real time updates?

Postgres is so powerful partly because of its ecosystem, so I want to know how much of that ecosystem is still useable if I’m using gel on top of Postgres

discuss

RedCrowbar|1 year ago

(article author here)

> If I use some other extension like timescale is that compatible with gel [...] Postgres is so powerful partly because of its ecosystem, so I want to know how much of that ecosystem is still useable if I’m using gel on top of Postgres

Playing nice with the ecosystem is the goal. We started off with more of a walled garden, but with 6.0 a lot of those walls came down with direct SQL support and support for standalone extensions [1]. There is a blog post coming about this specifically tomorrow (I think).

> And is there a story for replication

Replication/failover works out of the box.

> subscribing to queries for real time updates?

Working on it.

> so can I add gel to an existing Postgres instance and get the benefits of the nicer query language or does it rely on special tables?

Gel is built around its schema, so you will need to import your SQL schema. After that you can query things with EdgeQL (or SQL/ORM as before).

[1] https://github.com/geldata/gel-postgis

1st1|1 year ago

In the just released new version we've added SQL support, so now you can use SQL taking full advantage of our data model (access policies, mixins, etc) and the network protocol (automatic recovery on network & transaction error, automatic connection pooling on client/sever).

We'll continue bridging the gap to make it easier for companies to adopt Gel for an existing database. We either will invest in creating a tool for migration, or maybe some more exciting options we're currently pondering on.