Xata was on HackerNews once before (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28590816) a bit over a year ago, when we were at the beginning of our development. We've promised we're going to do a Show HN page when we come out of Private Beta, and this just happened today.
Xata is a product in the serverless database space. We know that the space is fairly crowded now, with lots of great companies started recently. We're happy to see a fresh wave of database products, that are focused more on the developer experience, rather than a race to the bottom on performance and cost.
We are part of this wave, but we also think our offering is quite differentiated:
- First, out of all the options out there, we're aiming to be the easiest to get started with and the easiest to use. We are cloud-only and our product feels more like a SaaS-like experience than an IaaS experience. If you've hacked together an app with data stored in Airtable or GitHub, you should try Xata next time. It's just as easy to use but has constraints, data integrity, type-safe clients, etc.
- We offer functionality from multiple data stores. Today, the source of truth for the data is in PostgreSQL and we also replicate it in Elasticsearch. This means that we can offer free-text-search and aggregation functionality that goes beyond what's possible in PostgreSQL. In the future, we'll add more functionality around in-memory caching, queues, etc, so all data patterns that you need are available via a single, serverless, consistent API. This sounds complex (and it is), but the complexity is entirely on our side. Your application can just reap the benefits.
- It is vertically integrated and focused on developer workflows: we provide a nice web UI, a TypeScript/JavaScript SDK, and VS Code extension, all working together with minimal friction. The TypeScript SDK is somewhat similar with Prisma, because it gives you type safety for both the parameters and the return types. However, it is different because it is a pure-TypeScript implementation, which means it is more lightweight and can run in Cloudflare Workers, Deno Deploy, etc.
Some more links, if you want to dig into the details:
- For examples of the API, see our API Guide: https://xata.io/docs/api-guide/insert
- For technical details about the inner workings of Xata, see our fairly long How it Works guide: https://xata.io/docs/intro/how-it-works
- We think this approach is new and gave it a name: Serverless Data Platform, which is explained here: https://xata.io/docs/intro/serverless-data-platfrom
- For a high-level overview of the features available, see: https://xata.io/features
We would really love your feedback!
