What 'Project Hail Mary' teaches us about the PlanetScale vs. Neon debate
34 comments
·July 5, 2025crims0n
Tangentially related, is this book worth the hype? I don't read a lot of genre fiction, but don't like to miss out on the exceptional (just finished and loved Flowers for Algernon, as an example).
Edit: Sounds like an enjoyable, low commitment book. Will give it a try, thanks for the feedback.
pjerem
The hype, absolutely not. I found the writing to be very poor. However I enjoyed it. The story is refreshing and straightforward.
To be fair, I read it months before the movie announcement and it really felt like reading a movie plot. If you prefer, I thought that the author had a great story idea but cared very little about writing a book, like he already knew this was for Hollywood.
I think with good production it’s going to be a better movie than the book.
Never read the Martian but I was told it was the same thing.
diggan
Obviously subjective, but I had seen The Martian before I read the book (many years after seeing the movie), and liked the book way better than the movie. Read Project Hail Mary right after finishing The Martian, and enjoyed that one even more. I guess the writing is a bit dry, but it kind of makes sense and I quite like it. I'm cautiously optimistic about the new movie.
ericol
> Never read the Martian but I was told it was the same thing.
That's the very feeling I had when I read 'The Martian'. While I was reading it I actually thought something to the tune (It's been years now) "This reads like a movie".
Guess that explains why the movie is so faithful to the book.
_qua
It's a fun read but, just like his other books, very one-dimensional characters with no depth. Not really remarkable literature, more of a bunch of Wikipedia articles strung together.
mritchie712
if Project Hail Mary isn't a good sci-fi book, what is a good one?
loteck
Almost nothing is worth the hype but the book is an enjoyable page turner if you like space adventures and speculative science. Audiobook also got some extra attention, I'd go with that if you like audiobooks.
GolfPopper
This. It was fun and very readable, but not something I have any desire to go back and read again.
konsalexee
It was really enjoyable to read. And I also do not read a lot of fiction, with my last book being the Hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy series.
My verdict is that Project Hail Mary was way much more engaging in terms of story-telling. The concepts were cool, and tbh I look forward for the movie and see if the adaptation will be nice
jowea
I liked the audiobook a lot, but I'm a SF aficionado, so my opinion may not be relevant. The other comment may be correct about the "serious literary critic" opinion.
sbelskie
If you don't read/like much genre fiction, I would say probably no. The pacing is well done and I genuinely find story compelling, but the writing while solid-ish is not exactly of high literary quality.
Additionally, in terms of genre I actually find Weir's books to be more like detective novels than sci-fi, though obviously lots of sci-fi elements in them.
jetbalsa
I've found and some have proven that sci-fi is just a setting of sorts, a background to the story at hand. For instance the Backyard Starship series is 100% a detective / cop novel set in space. Asimov did one called The Naked Sun that was pretty much a murder mystery and from what I understand written to prove a point that sci-fi really is just a setting to what ever main genre you want out of it.
sbelskie
Yea that makes a lot of sense. The first Expanse novel (at least Miller’s storyline) fits here as well.
izacus
If you can handle the terrible Gary Sue main character, it's a fun summer read.
ecshafer
No. Any Weir anything is not going to break into the tier of exceptional. Its YA fiction level writing with a bit of science sprinkled in.
chubot
Hm I feel like I jumped into the middle of something and don't understand the conclusion.
What's the beef between PlanetScale and Neon? Benchmarking, uptime, vibe coding?
The quote at the end doesn't really help me. Which one is good for what?
PhilippGille
To make it shorter than OP's reply, from my understanding of the offerings:
- PlanetScale for predictable load. You pick a config (CPU, memory) and if you don't have traffic it sits idle, and if you have traffic it's limited by the config you picked.
- Neon for scalability. You pay for compute hours, so if your traffic is spikey (e.g. concert ticket sales), you don't pay for idle resources during low traffic, and get all the compute you need during high traffic.
konsalexee
Long story short, I didn't want to make that analysis/distinction because it would miss the point.
They excel in their respective areas based on the architectural decisions they've made for the use cases they wanted to optimize for.
PlanetScale, with their latest Metal introduction, optimized for super low latency (they act like they've reinvented the wheel, lol), but they clearly have something in mind going in this direction.
Neon offers many managed features for serverless PostgreSQL that were missing in the market, like instant branching, and with auto-scaling, you may perform better with variable workloads. From their perspective, they wanted to serve other use cases.
There's no reason to always compare apples to oranges, and no reason to hate one another when everyone is pushing the managed database industry forward.
twoodfin
Well, I imagine at least the emotional aspect of this squabble had more than a billion reasons injected via Databricks.
sinnickal
Edelman PR
bitbasher
I don’t get it. Sending a query to a remote server is going to be much slower than sending the query to local database. When has Postgres not been enough on its own?
I agree with the overall sentiment of this post.
I’ve learned (sometimes the hard way!) that every design choice comes with real trade-offs. There’s no magic database architecture that optimizes every dimension (e.g., scalability, performance, ease-of-use) simultaneously.
Social media often pushes us into oversimplified "winner vs. loser" narratives, but this hides the actual complexity of building great infrastructure.
Recognizing and respecting these differences makes us smarter engineers, better community members, and frankly, just more enjoyable people to chat with.
PS Thank you for helping me add a new book to my list :-)