Yet another Hacker News

11 points jpsaccount 1 day ago 5 comments

jpsaccount 1 day ago | parent

Author here. Ampbase is an OpAMP control plane for agent fleets, and this is how it runs without a database: conditional writes for uniqueness and compare-and-swap, one bucket per customer so isolation isn't a WHERE clause somebody has to remember, ULID keys so history is a prefix list.

Two things the post doesn't cover and I'm happy to get into. What closing the cross-region lost update actually took: annotating the RPCs that depend on a compare-and-swap and replaying those to a single region, with a client-side guard. And the read amplification, which we have a plan for but waiting on a clear signal for when it’s needed.

Cross-posted with thanks to the Tigris folks; the original is at ampbase.io.

embedding-shape 26 minutes ago | parent

> and this is how it runs without a database

From the article:

> In practice, when you reach for a database engine you're actually reaching for four basic features: unique constraints, transactions, indices, and history tables. In order to use Tigris' global object storage as a database, we had to implement all of these primitives ourselves.

Not sure why the "without a database" is or isn't so important, why is it mentioned so often and why the article flip-flopping between "we don't have a DB" and "we're effectively building our own DB"?

typesanitizer 25 minutes ago | parent

> [..] so isolation isn't a WHERE clause somebody has to remember, [..] Two things the post doesn't cover and I'm happy to get into. What closing the cross-region lost update actually took: [..]

Set of my Claude alarm bell, and lo-and-behold, Pangram judges this comment to be 100% AI-generated, albeit with limited confidence.

jeremyjh 27 minutes ago | parent

Absolutely no mention of Iceberg or Delta Lake, which have had many of the same properties for years. I wonder if they are aware of them, or otherwise why they invented something new.

I generally don't read low-quality AI slop though, so its possible I missed an explanation that didn't contain those key words.