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Penca

branchable, versioned OLTP+OLAP on one open copy of your data

Details

External ID
49128567
Source
HN
Company
—
Product
Penca
Website domain
github.com
Launched
July 31, 2026
Cohort
—
Upvotes
14
Upvotes percentile
0.6338112305854241
Tags
—
Fetched at
Sept. 10, 2026, 5:32 a.m.
Updated at
Sept. 10, 2026, 5:32 a.m.

Description

Hi HN!This is an early proof of concept of a branchable, versioned OLTP + OLAP database that runs on a single, open copy of your data in object storage. If you are familiar with Databricks' LTAP (https://www.databricks.com/company/newsroom/press-releases/d...) announcement from June, you can think of this as aspiring to be a fully open source, Apache 2.0 LTAP alternative with additional data versioning/auditability guarantees that enable audit, as_of queries, and (eventually) revert straight out of the box.How it works:1. Writes land in vanilla postgres which functions as an ephemeral hot tier2. A background pass flushes committed rows out to columnar files in an object storage cold tier3. A DataFusion based query engine merges results across the two tiers (with some fancy caching and indexing)For a deep dive on the architecture/intended design/vision see: https://penca.io/blog/the-penca-architecture.html.This project is very, very early on. It is mostly a PoC right now and there are many bugs and shortcomings with many major items still on the roadmap. I hope to get some real performance numbers soon.A few features I would like to add in no particular order:- Iceberg export- Branching (from any branch, not just main)- Improved SQL support (e.g. multi-statement execution)- Full-text search and vector indexes- Configurable isolation levels (currently last write wins)- A pgwire frontendAny and all feedback is appreciated. I'd also like help! If any of this appeals to you and the project doesn't seem like the craziest idea of all time, shoot me an email at [email protected]: before someone comments this, yes, the code is heavily AI generated. I have tried to leave as much of the dev tooling in the repo as possible to demonstrate what the end-to-end development workflow looks like. Also, the majority of the commit history is missing as I had to rename/migrate + scrub the repo prior to open sourcing.

Enrichment

Theme
database infrastructure and developer tools
Vertical
Horizontal
Function
Data infrastructure
Audience
Developer
AI stance
Not AI
Project type
Commercial product
Normalized one-liner
versioned oltp and olap database on single copy of data
Manually corrected
False

Could you build this?

No Building a unified, versioned, branchable OLTP and OLAP storage engine on object storage requires world-class database systems research and distributed storage expertise.

What it would actually take: The system requires implementing snapshot isolation, MVCC, and Git-like branching over open columnar/row formats (e.g., Parquet or custom formats) on S3. The hard problems include building distributed transaction coordinators (commit protocols like Raft or foundation models) with low-latency writes on high-latency object storage, handling compaction/merging concurrently without write amplification, and providing vectorized query execution. It requires a seasoned database internals team skilled in C++/Rust, distributed consistency, and storage engine architecture.

Discussion

No comments on this launch.

Competitors

Other products that read as similar to this one — 69 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.

Attention rank: #33 of 70 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).

Launched 275 days after the earliest competitor.

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