Company
Date Published
Author
Carlota Soto
Word count
1495
Language
English
Hacker News points
None

Summary

Neon's superpower: Instant Point-in-Time Recovery (PITR) allows for the creation of a new branch at any point in time, enabling instant recovery of a dropped table without losing fresh data. This is made possible by Neon's copy-on-write storage model, which references existing storage pages until changes are made, resulting in near-instant recovery times of approximately one second, even for massive databases. Two recovery routes are available: Route 1, where production remains online and the missing table is copied from a PITR branch, and Route 2, where production is switched to the recovered branch without downtime. Neon's approach shines at scale due to its instant PITR, recover from an exact time using Time Travel, and point production to a restored branch without restarts. In contrast, AWS RDS Postgres relies on automated snapshots and WAL replays for PITR, resulting in slower recovery times that can take hours for large databases.