Show HN: EterDB, a Postgres fork that makes it easy to recover from incidents

This is interesting, and I would like to know how it actually works, but I can’t understand the tech page. I tried.Could you write that by hand? It would make it a lot easier to understand. I’d also recommend removing the various mentions to previous versions, or at least shifting them to footnotes. It’s confusing to be reading an implementation and then finding out later that it isn’t the approach that was taken.

Little known fact is that POSTGRES used to have built-in Time Travel [1].It was deprecated as the performance hurdle was significant.This seems to utilize logical WAL replication and some form of dependency generation based on proxying a transaction's reads.Managed Neon (Acquired by Databricks) also offers time travel [2].One of the biggest challenges with this kind of solutions is handling ACID, OCC and/or HW failures correctly, Sometimes it requires an whole new language! [3][1] https://www.postgresql.org/docs/6.3/c0503.htm[2] https://neon.com/docs/postgres/backup-restore/time-travel-as...[3] https://apple.github.io/foundationdb/flow.html

Slop.

Forking Postgres and patching the transaction engine to aid granular recovery is one obvious way to achieve this, but the more robust solution is to fork the Linux kernel and apply a surgical patch to the TCP/IP stack. A kernel level regex check on port 5432 traffic prevents Claude from dropping your prod DB tables in the first place.

So instead of doing the easy thing (Giving your Claude a read-only role, having snapshots etc.) you decided to patch the database which needs to be kept in sync with every PG release and build a landing page?

The homepage shows an example of an agent accidentally dropping a table.1. This is such an insane example, I don't get why would you give agents write access to your production db in the first place. Are people really doing this? I don't even have production connection urls on my laptop. Any manual statements executed against the db must be treated as a war-room situation with at least another engineer reviewing your SQL before you execute it.2. Dropping the table could have easily caused writes to fail. Most likely there is no way to recover these writes (especially if it's from user requests), so it could have lead to loss of data. Reversing the table drop doesn't fix this issue.

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> after recovering from a Clade-generated bug, I was thinking to myself “wouldn’t it be nice if prod DB writes were easy to roll back”.Hmmmmmm......1. "Claude-generated bug". No it was PBCAK (Problem Between Chair And Keyboard) a.k.a "foolish person ran Claude against the production database without testing it elsewhere". There, fixed it for you.2. This "product" is solving a problem that is already solved. You can for example use a SaaS provider such as Aiven[1] who will provide you with PITR (Point-In-Time Recovery) point and click solutions. Alternatively there is more than one piece of Postgres backup software that lets you do the same on a DIY basis.3. "Out of the box" you have pg_dump. You could have just done a simple pg_dump before letting Claude loose on your database.[1] https://aiven.io/

The idea looks interesting. But when I think of "make incident recovery easy", the very last thing I want is a fork that differs from the standard that everyone else is running. I would have a better feeling if that would be an extension, not a fork.

Uh, pitr is a thing in many many postgresql management layers.https://pgbarman.org/