r/SQL • u/sqlink2 • 1d ago

PostgreSQL Is anyone actually using Databricks Lakebase in production?

My team is thinking of trying Lakebase instead of running a separate Postgres/ RDS db for our app.
The idea of auto sync to Delta and scaling to zero sound great, but we are worried about latency issu. If u are usin it, how noticeable are the cold start delays when it wake up backup, and does it feel fast enough for live user traffics?

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u/Commercial_Repeat711 1d ago

We tried it for a few weeks for exactly that use case, app that could benefit of the zero scaling since it only gets traffic in bursts. Cold start delay is not terrible if your dataset isn't huge, maybe 2-3 seconds for first query after the idle period. After that it was smooth enough, felt like a regular postgres but without all the maintenance headache

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u/Einar_Son_of_Bjorn 1d ago

We tried routing live traffic to a lakehouse setup, but the cold start delays from compute separation were a nightmare. If your main goal is just to avoid building a flaky ETL sync from Postgres, you don't have to sacrifice OLTP latency. On our project, we ended up using MariaDB to handle both workloads in one instance - keep the live app fast using standard InnoDB tables, and use cross-engine joins with a DuckDB engine for our analytics. It gives us that consolidated stack without the cold starts.

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u/sqlink2 1d ago

Ya, Lakebase avoids cold start by useof “always on” Postgres endpoint for sub 10ms OLTP writes, auto -syncing to the lakehouse in realtime without custom ETL .

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u/Glitch_In_The_Data 1d ago

Replaced a standalone RDS instance with Lakebase a few months ago and the cold start worry was our hesitation too. When you actually use it, the wake up is a few hundred milli seconds. So the first query after an idle window feels like a slightly slow page loads but not a timeout. After the first connection, everything runs at normal PG speed. We only saw issues in test env’s where the db actually goes fully idle for hours. In prod,, real traffic keeps it warm and isn’t a major issue.