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.

- 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.

Don't watch the trailer for the movie though, it's very spoiler-heavy.

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

It's maybe not a literary masterpiece and it's suspiciously similar to The Martian if you squint. But not many books can get me laughing out loud the second or third time through.

It's a really fun read and I find the aliens particularly compelling in a way that most Sci-Fi doesn't get right.

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.

TBF I am trying to write fiction for the first time in my writing career, and I also suck at characters and non contrived story engagement, so I’m not trying to throw stones here. I do hope, however, to do better in my first published fiction.

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.

PHM, from the same author, I was very much expecting to be very good to amazing. It delivered, but it's a different feeling when you see it coming