Pigsty Blog Articles

Public cloud margins worse than sand mining—why are pig-butchering schemes losing money? Resource-selling models heading toward price wars, open source alternatives breaking monopoly dreams! Service competitiveness gradually neutralized—where is the cloud computing industry heading? How did domestic cloud vendors make a business with 30-40% pure profit less profitable than sand mining?

SLA is a marketing tool rather than insurance. In the worst-case scenario, it's an unavoidable loss; at best, it provides emotional comfort.

Pigsty v2.1 provides support for PostgreSQL 12 through 16, with PGVector for AI embeddings.

The cost-cutting imperative has triggered a reevaluation of all technologies, including databases. This series critiques hot DB technologies and poses fundamental questions about their trade-offs: Are cloud databases, distributed databases, microservices, and containerization real needs or false hype?

Similar to Maslow's hierarchy of needs, user demands for databases also have a progressive hierarchy: physiological needs, safety needs, belonging needs, esteem needs, cognitive needs, aesthetic needs, self-actualization needs, and transcendence needs.

This article focuses on vector databases hyped by AI, introduces the basic principles of AI embeddings and vector storage/retrieval, and demonstrates the functionality, performance, acquisition, and application of the vector database extension PGVECTOR through a concrete knowledge base retrieval case study.

As hardware technology advances, the capacity and performance of standalone databases have reached unprecedented heights, which makes distributed (TP) databases appear utterly powerless, much like the "data middle platform" wearing the emperor's new clothes.

Even Amazon's SOA team admits that microservices and serverless have problems. The Prime Video team switched to a monolith, saving 90% in operational costs.

The real business model of cloud: **"Cheap" EC2/S3 to attract customers, and fleece with "Expensive" EBS/RDS**

I originally believed that at least in IaaS fundamentals — storage, compute, and networking — public cloud vendors could still make significant contributions. However, my personal experience with Tencent Cloud CDN shook that belief: domestic cloud vendors' products and services are truly unbearable.