“Serverless” Databases

Remember that?

like a pretty good option as well. They got some And then there are also lots of open standards like, with most traditional databases, Ken. So that is Yeah. At least as I understand it, not as big of a deal 40% The connection from your cell phone to the actual server. So that's called backbone or backhaul, meaning that like these every ISP Serverless.

does, but in Postgres instead of my SQL.

we had a security breach email, so it kinda made me a little bit concerned for them. But,

big big They may have just taken that out of

design on this website.

Stores the data in a graph.

some heavy hitters. Wes Guillermo,

really great

Yeah.

Yeah. That was a while ago. So Oh, yeah? Oh, at least they sent it. Yeah. No. Oh, no. No kidding. Yeah. Because it's not about Yeah. This railway seems pretty cool. There's a a lot of companies in the space right now. When I used it, the,

Because, like, remember, we were like, what the heck is a graph? I know.

Have you seen Fauna? Is I thought Fauna was like a graph database.

Yeah. I actually tried out Railway before, and I found the experience to be really nice. But I I got infrastructure and then oh, yeah. Wait. That seems like a harder task than just hacking together a quick little demo. Yeah. Redis, Cassandra,

Tom Preston Warner. Oh, yeah? Yeah. Awesome.

It is

After, like, a couple of months of being on Railway, I did get, like, a at least they're fat pipes, though, you know, they're fat pipes. Exactly. Exactly.

You're not gonna lose the special sauce if you wanna host it yourself. Us. Next one is Neon at Neon dot tech,

serverless Postgres.

well. Yeah.

which we talked about. You don't have to have a connection. There's no connection pooling. It's just request in, request out, and it has GraphQL and that is

which seems pretty good. It's on a super base.

Let's see. No. It just says GraphQL. Okay. I was thinking that Fauna was, like,

is another popular one. It's distributed, so I think they will distribute them around the world. It's SQL.

This just this seems like it's, Yeah. It's its own NoSQL. I don't see any word where it says graph database on their site. That's the only reason why it has, like, hesitate on that. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I See, that's like a lot of the other graph databases. Like, graph database, you know, and

It says you bring the code, we'll handle the rest. So they they are a host, a deployment Yeah. Yeah. So I asked, like, what should I use?

they got that this kinda locked in. So let let's talk about them really quickly. Cloudflare has 2 solutions. They just rolled it out last week. D one unreal. It's so Obviously, It handled it. No problem.

40% Supabase,

Is there,

And those things are both built for Cloudflare, which is serverless edge the package because it's it's a MySQL database. So you can literally you could use You could use Prisma if you wanted. Yeah.

like, nothing, Just to just show, like, some load on there. So I made a simple little website with Deno that is server rendered, I put that on begin.com So the Yeah. Tell them. The other thing that we should know about edge databases is that These entirely. Right? around building your website. They encourage you to Think of your website as a slice machine, framework. Actually, it's from Planet Yeah. It's a node package, but I ran it in Deno no problem. I deployed it to Deno Deploy, Boss and Scott

SQL based database? It still is proprietary, So that is a very good option. AWS DynamoDB. And then they have AWS hosting. We'll talk about all the solutions in just a second.

And I remember when you did that. That was Yeah. A fun idea. It got, like, half a 1000000 hits and didn't even stumble, by understanding

but it is an SQL database.

Scalable they will try to scale that up for you,

instances or you access that database instance. And then anytime you Wow.

So the solution I would pick Atlas that actually Scott and I both use. They now offer a serverless offering,

You're not going to be able to connect to your database which is essentially every little you either That is running. They are all connected on fat pipes, and they can talk to each other much more quickly than your cell phone That is half underground in the subway, Which is amazing. I remember Brian Lewer, who runs begin, was like, we were watching that. We were wondering if we'd have to scale it up, but Then you've just introduced a single is that,

connection.

Your your app starts. Right? And when your app starts, you connect to your database, and then you have this reference to your database but other than that, it was I only went Like, I can run at my SQL commands, but they will handle all of the connection pooling for you.

that that working. There's generally a limit to the amount of at times that you can connect to an actual database.

you connect to them.

tweets out your your thing, and all of a sudden you have a 1000000 people on your website in one go.

So in my case, I use PlanetScale

a 100 times without Deno is

that is running westb0 s s.com It's connectionless, I thought, okay. I need to I was just realigning in. Yeah. I need to do something about it's probably a lot of you listening to the podcast because

Run your queries. It's using that already preexisting

and you could query and pull data and save data. Right. Like you're used to that, right? Scott, I mean, you it doesn't matter that it's MongoDB. All databases kind of work that you do one connection. You you run a server somewhere because of the type of query I wrote, they had to queue up.

40, 50 different things running or if you have a spike

You export whatever database

Yeah. Right. A single point. Yeah. Yes.

and then you

In traffic, somebody very popular that has to, like, replicate extremely quickly across .com, I think if I were to do it today,

database because of all the benefits. We're gonna go all in on it. This is not going anywhere. Other people say, no problem. Actually, I went over the free plan on Deno. And, like, I don't I didn't tell Deno folks I'm gonna do this or whatever. I just signed up and deployed it within like 10 minutes. And Dino handled it without,

We'll lock into the proprietary is running on probably 40 different machines around the world, Colorado, I hit the 1 here in Toronto, and somebody else will hit 1 in Europe depending on on where they're going. And so I I've been feeling pretty comfortable with serverless over the last couple years, but The database aspect of it has always been but it seems like a really good option.

CS service as well that will allow you to scale up. And I always think about, like, what happens if I wanna move out of this type of thing? And for a lot of people, I say, it's fine. We'll and then you you jump into your Next or Nuxt or or or React or whatever it is that you're working with, It. So as long as you you you connect to it in a specific way that you show that you're doing connection pooling, rather than you having to run from some infrastructure there. So you you still are doing it, but they are sort of, like, handling that Sauce under the thing, which I think is a really neat and all of those machines need to connect to database. So that's kind of our next step is that, like, why can't you just use a regular But at a certain point, the database at least at least from my and then I, and A lot of you say, alright. Well, that's how you spell boss. Right? My boss is one s. So I thought I'll make a silly little website as I do, 250,000 It. So, that is pretty popular as well, Okay. The initial request from your phone to the server, but there still will be some connect built baked into it. So that seems like that that I think pretty sure this is all, Like, will this really hold up? And like like, obviously, I'm nowhere near, I decided to go straight into the database. That is not a limitation of 20,000, you shouldn't have to change your too much database code. Right? Yeah. No kidding.

Postgres, which I That's the bottle that's kind of the bottleneck at at that point is that, okay, now you have a single server. So so the solution to that is,

because the rest of the 20% was scattered on the rest of the stuff that I have here. So I was, on all their servers around the world, and it's really cool. It shows you popping up in Africa and in Europe and in,

they are like a Sivana seems like a good Supabase SQL relational database.

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serverless

You know, when you get into serverless anything, one of the question that always comes up is, what about databases? So we're gonna be answering that question for you and quite a bit more today. This episode is sponsored by 2 amazing companies today, Prismic and LogRocket.

We are also sponsored by Prismic.

Word. Cool. Well, thank you so much for for this.

for a full archive of all of our shows. And don't forget to subscribe in your podcast player it. Or drop a review if you like this show.

Head on over to syntax.fm

I I've left smarter.

something that was either Postgres in this case, is that if you have a Slim experience. There's probably people that are much larger experts than me learning in 1 week.

I got an email the other day. It says, hey. Your website's down. And somebody screenshotted it, and it was west b o s s s.com, and I realized I had not been redirecting that. So I looked at the cloud flare stats and, like, seems like a, really good solution. So, integration database.

something like 400 people a week were going to the wrong domain.

onto 40 different servers around the world. And And they said, no. It's not a connection pooling limit, but Toronto and in all all around the world, and it's it's actually kind of cool. So that code Did they do images as well? I'm curious.

Generate a PDF or send a push notification Really gorgeous. That is a very nice website. Oh, cool. Yeah, they did. They're doing an awesome, awesome job. Railway is another one that people were recommending. I think Railway is

And However, connections, meaning that you send a request the database the database handles the request and then sends a response back much like a HTTP and what are what are the other ones here? Supabase, Neon.

where the function is running is very important, meaning that your edge function

a little bit, like, shaky to me. So I thought, okay. Every time I come up with a new project that I need to do,

the you you let's say you have some code that will, 327,000 So apparently, that will go even higher on a paid plan. So I thought that was kind of cool. And I think you probably like, we had the show on serverless limitations.

why is a database

and whatever this idea of serverless database stuff goes. So I am going to be asking you some dumb questions as you talk through some of this stuff, and, hopefully, that can provide some insight for the listener who might also not know anything about this. So Do you wanna maybe give a little bit of an overview as terms of, like,

myself, am admittedly

in both serverless

Have to be different for serverless solutions? Or what's what why does it have to be different? Yeah. So I I think, like, real quick, a host.

the latency that you're removing by being at the edge in the 1st place, if it's having to then do Some other connections and talking before that data is,

secret sauce was. I thought they were doing, like, an edge a database,

but it's just connection pulling. No. They do they do a lot more than that. They do scaling and and whatnot. And I I talked to a couple of people from

Any of

Don't isn't that sort of foregoing the whole benefit of Edge? Because the idea with Edge is that the code is running as close to AU as possible, right?

I'll talk about because mine did go down.

all of the instances. Right? Right. And at that point, does that negate

I'll talk about that in just a second.

I always thought this is what PlanetScale's

or or locked in there. I forget what the The term is that they typically use. Also, I I always thought this is what

Across the globe? I think that's kind of tricky because, like, if I update mine databases, use a service that will be able to handle and scale up the connection pooling for you.

you know Yeah. Considered to be official You can also

used a database Amazing. I was just like sitting there. I was like, I don't know what to do. Like, I know the select star from whatever, but

called PlanetScale.

And a lot of people are saying, yeah, check out PlanetScale.

from or I update the number of hits in the database, and then I query the number of hits back from the database.

And then I just grabbed a, and you create components that are associated with each of those slices, and then your user can just kinda put them together, and it's a website builder from there. It's awesome. Check it on out at prismic.ioforward/syntax.

I wanna host it with Dino, And the answer to that is there are people trying to figure out how to replicate databases you're just writing Might be distributed Scott hits the 1 in I really like that it's still MySQL.

So it was it was really yeah. It's it's kind of a cool website. So when you say you use this node package to work with PlanetScale,

I don't I don't I say go to westboss.comforward/courses, the benefit of serverless

Yeah. I haven't used the serverless version of that at all myself.

So the MongoDB

That that's the part that stresses me out the most. It's like, oh, I'd love to try some of this stuff with my existing

how much RAM I need and how much space I need and whatnot. And,

which essentially is instead of you us. Choosing that is We either have a MySQL database already or a Postgres database, or we just want to stay on some sort of open standard. Man, we got to do a whole show on Superbase sometime soon. Yeah.

serverless offering essentially just scales up and down as you need it.

No. I I should I should give it a give it a shot. I don't think it will be all that much different from what I'm doing, which is kind of nice because you don't really have to

server. Yeah,

in this space. The other thing people are asking is, like like, if you have Edge functions, And it was probably PlanetScale or MySQL or MongoDB,

keep the connection open and whatnot. They use basically

exactly.

but But you have 1 database that's hosted And I want to have some sort of database, and there's no database really needed for this thing. So I made a hit. Yeah. But just essentially every single time someone hits the website, Right? Exactly. Yeah. So the problem with serverless or whatever. That's the idea with serverless is that you just create these little functions like you would in regular JavaScript.

stateless, Like, obviously, they have the API and all that really good stuff, but they have fantastic but pick a service, a hosting service that will scale for me and do all the connection pooling.

requests in less than an hour.

They must have some sort and every little component that you have, make an associated use the I just grabbed a node MySQL The other one, AWS has two value 2,

You should probably think about that type of request throughout the life of your application, DynamoDB.

like, actual companies that get millions of requests a day, but I had a couple people.

increments and then return those all. And at a certain point, I hit the limit of the free plan.

What you had done is synchronous requests. So I was incrementing a number So I deployed this thing and I tweeted it out. And first of all, the Dino deploy inherently the in that. Yeah. Yeah. Well, like if you I gotta go from Australia to they You have to increment it, send it back, increment it, send it back. So what was happening was Yeah. Yeah. You can also host it yourself. I like that. I like companies like that. Century's like that as well. It's like, I'll pay you. Yeah. But I just like to know that I Could host them myself if I really wanted to. I just I agree. Yeah. Seriously.

Right. Because

What do you return? PlanetScale, Next up, we have MongoDB

of servers, but people sent me

Didn't go down, but the database started throwing errors. And I said, oh, like, what's the problem here? And I talked to the folks from PlanetScale, like, Is this a is this a connection pooling limit? Like, did I hit too many pooling? in Colorado.

Someone someone out there's got some servers and some fat pipes ready to send over some data. Yeah.

if you are scaling up because if that.

essentially every single request depends on the request before it. Right. So they were sort of queuing up very, very long. And at a certain point, I hit the I hit the limit of it. So, which is awesome. So they do real time. You can scale it up yourself.

Request that somebody somebody out there has some freaking servers that was able to very quickly send a very a high amount of traffic.

And Deno, So some of the other graph databases that we've looked at. I don't think it is. Like, isn't Graph database just a database that points to other documents? Yeah.

SQLite, is there any of that stuff? Yeah. SQLite. You could literally use anything that that

But that is just because Fauna, like, you run an edge function, the connection from your edge function to where your database is hosted is way faster Taking in requests and just basically send sending them over that single one connection that you have.

Runs SQL queries, but I didn't want to get into that. I wanted to just I was just selecting a value from the database. So I was just writing raw SQL queries, which I have not done in and then ran the database on PlanetScale. And I asked Ask on Twitter, like, what should I what should I be using? where they just So it seems why can't you just use a regular database with serverless functions? There are different solutions. You gotta think about relational databases, MySQL, However, we have lots of existing applications. And if you want to move them,

I didn't know much past that, so I had to look it up. I hear you. I would have to I would have to get into some heavy docs if I was going to be doing that by hand right now. Yeah.

Yes.

is that kind of like a friendlier way? Because I know we had talked offline a little bit ago

About you writing SQL queries and stuff, do you still have to write SQL queries with this package?

Probably 12 years.

it's super, super simple. There's no build step or anything like that. But from git commit push down once or twice over the what's it at right now? to that is this thing called connection pooling, which essentially is that you you create a connection, Aurora, which is their It. So

way to approach it because but they have secret sauce, which is, without a sweat.

I'm not buying into some proprietary so that I could just use my regular adapters and queries and stuff like that,

typically how you will be approaching these, the MongoDB is increased at any time, then it will scale up very quickly. And if the demand goes away, then you're not you're not running that code at all. It. So that's that's kinda what serverless is at a high level view. We've got lots more podcasts on that. And sorta along with serverless, you have this idea of edge functions, which Essentially is the same thing, except

They just host MySQL databases. But part of their secret sauce is that

database host.

solution here, the amount of resources you need. So in in my MongoDB, I have to log in and and choose very much like than It's edge, meaning that it will run every single time someone hits the thing. So what happens when a 100,000 people hit an endpoint or let's say 10,000 people hit an endpoint at the same time.

will allow you they will do the connection pooling for you.

The other solution is you use like purpose built databases that do not No SQL base.

versus server.

Then past that, you gotta think about proprietary

Those are MySQL Standard stuff. I can run a MySQL database locally. No problem.

databases, which is often called NoSQL, I'm assuming they also handle the connection pooling issue, But I think they they do a lot more, and it seems like people really like them, especially it. In the PHP world, because MySQL, PHP, they're they're pretty good friends.

Postgres, all of those, Versus nonrelational open standards. So there are It's a MySQL So So let's talk about actual solutions out there.

services out there, Firebase, Cloudflare, However, if the demand

PlanetScale function and part of so PlanetScale is a MySQL Supabase is kind of like it's pretty much just open source Firebase, I used that one. I this is not my 1st hit counter I've created in the in the past.

where they say, alright, use our database. This is how you use it. This is our API.

Lots of proprietary They have tons of really good examples.

data I do 2 things. I query And then they also have Cloudflare key key value storage. They've had that for a while as well. So you it kinda you think about, like, MySQL or IndexedDB. You wanna be able to start start key values.

They are a headless CMS that provides to it being live was 1 or 2 seconds, You can. I'm pretty sure they host it. Yeah. They have pricing, And it shows you as I tweeted it out, it shows you where it is spinning up around the world because, it.

input in Prismic with that. And then your marketing people, your lawyers, the people that are running the website, you yourself can go ahead and edit That content, you can click together those slices, for you as well. I have not looked into that, but quite a few people were recommending that as well.

tooling, I I always like to learn a new piece of tech. So my problem was I have this website, Wes Boss, with two s's, that apparently work really well with serverless. And then we have Firebase on top of here, which has been around for Quite a while. So tons and tons of options. That's probably only half or or a quarter of the possible options that are out there, but it kind of gives you a good idea of I made a a hit counter that rendered to a PNG.

Just by doing a quick scan of the website, I think you'll understand But that's The sort of the one solution.

how it all works. Thank you, Prismic, for sponsoring. Sick.

So once I,

There's lots of them out there. Some of the proprietary, some of them are not. Some of them are MySQL or sorry. Some of them are SQL based and some of them are, Oh, yeah. A long time ago.

2 very popular NoSQL save all of your data in columns.

pretty evolving right now, too. Yes. Yes, I agree. So

so I I might be the type to look for One of these actual solutions rather than trying to do some sort of connection pulling on my own. Yeah.

or connection pooling doesn't really sound that much fun to me

Yeah. It also feels like this is a space that is Underskilled

that's all I got for today. If you've got any tips on serverless databases, make sure you tweet us at syntaxfm. We'd love to hear especially if you've, like, converted, proprietary, My profile in Colorado they do it looks like they kinda do what, That will just redirect the user. But for this one, I want to,

Like a server app to serverless. I'd love to hear, like, what did you do about your database? Yeah. I'm very curious as well because, again, This is something I'm fairly ignorant about in general. So this this definitely cleared up a lot for me, Wes, in terms of, like, what are the issues there? Enrolling your own server pooling the interface was really nice, and the whole thing felt really good to use. So I I was a fan of Railway when I tried it. If you look at their investors, their investors are,

Welcome to Syntax.

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it it's gotta get on a train somewhere and go through the middle of the earth. You know, there's there's pipes.

to Virginia. There's certainly So That's solution number 1,

So I put this thing out there and I said, like, I just tweeted out. I said, like, go for it. Give me as much traffic as you can because I really want to see, Like, Supabase and PlanetScale, Their marketing as in Toronto and then Scott queries for that,

So Awesome. Alright. Catch you later. Peace. Peace.