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A First Look at Neon: A Postgres Database That Branches

In General
February 14, 2023


Relational databases have a long, long history. The first appeared in the 1970s, and while the technology has certainly evolved, the relational model has proved the most popular over the last 5 decades.

Is there room for innovation after 50 years of history? The folks at Neon are showing us that one can, in fact, teach an old dog new tricks.

What is Neon?

Neon is an open-source (Apache 2.0) alternative to AWS Aurora or Google’s Cloud SQL for Postgres. Neon is a serverless, scalable implementation of PostgreSQL that you can run on-premise or try through its managed service.

Neon decomposes the PostgreSQL architecture into two layers: compute and storage. The compute layer consists of stateless PostgreSQL running on Kubernetes, allowing pods to be scaled on demand — even to zero.

Persistence is achieved with the Neon storage engine, a custom-made layer that handles both transactions and data. The transaction log is processed through a set of redundant…



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