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The differences between OrioleDB and Neon

· 5 min read
Alexander Korotkov
Alexander Korotkov
Creator of OrioleDB

In a recent Hacker News discussion, there was some confusion about the differences between OrioleDB and Neon. Both look alike at first glance. Both promise a "next‑gen Postgres". Both have support for cloud‑native storage.

This post explains how the two projects differ in practice. And importantly, OrioleDB is more than an undo log for PostgreSQL.

The Core Differences​

OrioleDB​

OrioleDB is a Postgres extension. It implements a Table Access Method to replace the default storage method (Heap), providing the following key features:

  1. MVCC based on UNDO, which prevents bloat as much as possible;
  2. IO-friendly copy‑on‑write checkpoints with very compact row‑level WAL;
  3. An effective shared memory caching layer based on squizzled pointers.

Neon​

Neon uses the default Table Access Method (Heap) and replaces the storage layer. The WAL is written to the safekeepers, and blocks are read from page servers backed by object storage, providing instant branching and scale-to-zero capabilities.