Top all-time · #1577
Xata
Company blog · xata.io/blog · on HN as tudorgdataprogrammingai
Xata is the company blog at xata.io, writing about data, programming and ai. Since 2021, 46 different Hacker News readers have linked it 163 times, most often “Show HN: Xata, serverless database on top of PostgreSQL and Elasticsearch”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-29, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (25) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Xata's blog for technical posts on Postgres, including table-level locks, zero-downtime schema migrations, and branching and storage design. Many comments are hiring posts or product mentions.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 25 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Start fresh or branch an existing Postgres in seconds. Scale to zero when idle.
Most-linked posts?
- Show HN: Xata, serverless database on top of PostgreSQL and Elasticsearch6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2021-06-02
- How to Distribute Postgres Geographically5 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2024-05-16
- Xata OSS: Postgres platform with branching, now Apache 2.04 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2026-04-15
- On the Performance of Replica Identity Full in Postgres4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2023-06-07
- Multi-version schema migrations for Postgres4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2024-07-16
- Xata: Postgres at scale, with copy-on-write branching and anonymization4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2025-05-14
- /3 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2022-05-04
- Reaction to the PlanetScale PostgreSQL Benchmarks3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2025-07-16
- Speeding up PostgreSQL dump/restore snapshots3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2025-07-02
- After vibe coding comes vibe observability3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2025-03-25
What Hacker News says?
Xata | REMOTE Europe, North America and South America | xata.io Xata is a platform that lets developers create instant branches of their Postgres databases using anonymized production data. It replaces traditional, shared staging environments with isolated, fast, and secure database copies, so every developer or AI agent can work safely on real data without risking production. We are looking for: - Platform engineer…
Comment linking /careers
on “Ask HN: Who is hiring? (November 2025)”Submitted Xata – Database service for serverless apps as a story · 185 points
HN discussionThis is really cool and I love to see the interest in fast clones / branching here. We've built Xata with this idea of using copy-on-write database branching for staging and testing setups, where you need to use testing data that's close to the real data. On top of just branching, we also do things like anonymization and scale-to-zero, so the dev branches are often really cheap. Check it out at https://xata.io/ > Th…
Comment linking /
on “Instant database clones with PostgreSQL 18”Submitted Postgres Webhooks with Pgstream as a story · 160 points
HN discussionThis is really cool, looking forward to trying it out. Obligatory mention of Neon ( https://neon.com/ ) and Xata ( https://xata.io/ ) which both support “instant” Postgres DB branching on Postgres versions prior to 18.
Comment linking /
on “Instant database clones with PostgreSQL 18”Submitted Speeding up PostgreSQL dump/restore snapshots as a story · 156 points
HN discussionSupabase is one that I'll consider, Xata [0] is another one that is interesting. Thankfully I just need "postgres", I don't need branching/PII-clearing/etc. That's all nice to have but I don't need it for my app. I really would prefer a managed DB for multiple reasons but I might need to look at just self-hosting. I might have spent less time futzing with my DB if I had done that from the start instead of going Auro…
Comment linking /
on “Databricks acquires Neon”Submitted Introducing pgzx: create PostgreSQL extensions using Zig as a story · 156 points
HN discussionHey! (Disclaimer: I work at Xata.) Just wanted to mention that we also support anonymization, in case that’s something you're looking into: https://xata.io/postgres-data-masking
Comment linking /postgres-data-masking
on “Databricks acquires Neon”Submitted How to Distribute Postgres Geographically as a story · 129 points
HN discussionIf you want to deploy the whole platform inside your own AWS account, we have a Bring Your Own Cloud model: https://xata.io/byoc If you want to get anonymization from your RDS/Aurora instance and into Xata branches, then you run only a CLI command (`xata clone`) which does something similar to pg_dump/pg_restore but with masking. It is based on our pgstream open source project. Happy to organize a demo any time.
Comment linking /byoc
on “Databricks acquires Neon”Submitted The economics of a Postgres free tier as a story · 124 points
HN discussion[Disclaimer: I work for Xata] As it happens, we've just launched our new Xata platform ( https://xata.io/ ) which has some of the key Neon features: instant copy-on-write branching and separation of storage and compute. As an extra twist, we also can do anonymization (PII masking) between your production database and developer branches. The way we do copy-on-write branches is a bit different. We haven't done any mod…
Comment linking /
on “Databricks acquires Neon”Submitted Going down the rabbit hole of Postgres 18 features as a story · 56 points
HN discussionXata | Full-time | Remote in North and South America, Europe, Africa | https://www.xata.io/ We have open positions for backend (primarily Golang) and frontend (Typescript) engineers, SRE, as well as DevRel / Developer Advocate: https://angel.co/company/xata-inc/jobs Xata.io is a fully distributed startup building a serverless database service. We all work remotely, usually from home, and we meet in person a couple o…
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: Who is hiring? (November 2021)”Submitted Show HN: Xata, serverless database on top of PostgreSQL and Elasticsearch as a story · 47 points
HN discussionXata ( https://xata.io ) | Fully Remote: based in Europe or East Coast USA | Asynchronous | Full-time Xata is building a modern cloud database on top of PostgreSQL. We offer features like: automatic scaling, branches, zero-downtime migrations, a built-in search engine, analytics, and more. - We are engineer-led: We build developer tooling, we trust our engineers to shape our products, and at our core we're a hardcor…
Comment linking /careers/3425123
on “Ask HN: Who is hiring? (March 2024)”Submitted From OpenAPI spec to MCP: How we built Xata's MCP server as a story · 45 points
HN discussionXata | https://xata.io | Typescript and Golang engineers | REMOTE Xata.io is a fully distributed startup building a serverless database service for Jamstack apps. We all work remotely, usually from home, and we meet in person a couple of times per year in a nice location (once the pandemic allows). We hire primarily in US and European timezones, supporting a large number of countries. Having founders with management…
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: Who is hiring? (June 2021)”Submitted Xata: Postgres at scale, with copy-on-write branching and anonymization as a story · 45 points
HN discussionCheck out https://xata.io/ We've taken a lot of inspiration from Airtable and applied it on top of a real database, so it sounds quite similar to the feature set that you are describing. We're in closed beta but I'm happy to give you access if you want to try it.
Comment linking /
on “Ultorg: A user interface for relational databases [video]”Submitted Schema changes and the Postgres lock queue as a story · 45 points
HN discussionI haven't tried it but it looks like Xata has come up with a neat solution to DB migrations (at least for postgres). There can be two versions of the app running. https://xata.io/blog/multi-version-schema-migrations
Comment linking /blog/multi-version-schema-migrations
on “Kamal Proxy – A minimal HTTP proxy for zero-downtime deployments”Submitted Postgres major version upgrades with minimal downtime as a story · 38 points
HN discussionI wonder why other providers don't use metal ssd sync replication technique that planetscale uses? Most of them just default to EBS. My interest in it peaked when I heard about NVMe over Fabrics (NVMe/TCP) and SPDK from Xata[1] and apparently with that performance is as good as planetscale metal, but planetscale found their methodology flawed[2] and they Xata never responded. [1] https://xata.io/blog/reaction-to-the…
Comment linking /blog/reaction-to-the-planetscale-postgresql-benchmarks
on “PlanetScale Offering $5 Databases”Submitted Creating an advanced search engine with PostgreSQL as a story · 27 points
HN discussionWe're building on top of Aurora at https://xata.io . Currently our Aurora instances are in private beta. If you're interested in trying it out, drop me an email: richard@xata.io
Comment linking /
on “Heroku Postgres is now based on AWS Aurora”Submitted Pgzx: Postgres Extensions with Zig as a story · 26 points
HN discussionHi everyone, I am Tudor, CTO at Xata. Thanks for posting the link! We’re not yet ready for you to try it out, so it is maybe a bit too early to show it to this community. We will probably do a proper Show HN post once we are ready. Nevertheless we are thrilled to be here! :) For a few more details, see also our first blog post: https://www.xata.io/blog/hello-world/ We’re building a database service that is extremely…
Comment linking /blog/hello-world/
on “Xata – Database service for serverless apps”Submitted Xata Is Now Live as a story · 16 points
HN discussion
