Aiven for PostgreSQL Pros and Cons

What do you like best about Aiven for PostgreSQL?

I like the all-in-one feel of Aiven best. It's like a swiss army knife for doing DBA stuff. I don't have to worry about setting up repl, getting slow query logs, or backups - it's all just done for me! Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about Aiven for PostgreSQL?

I would love a view that can show me replication topology graphically. I'd also love it if at least the postgres service provided a breakdown of how disk space was being used rather than just overall disk usage. It would help spot things like repl logs piling up for example. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you like best about Aiven for PostgreSQL?

I moved to Aiven from RDS as I needed the performance improvements in pg10, and RDS was talking a very long time to make this release available. I've been very happy with Aiven since, my bill is less that it was with RDS, the performance is far better, and I can actually talk to people when I need support. I recommend Aiven to everyone. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about Aiven for PostgreSQL?

Not alot, there is quite a fee jump from the entry to mid tier. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you like best about Aiven for PostgreSQL?

Ease of use, availability of extensions, ability to use Debezium. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about Aiven for PostgreSQL?

No Postgresql 12 yet, no direct access to WAL. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you like best about Aiven for PostgreSQL?

Unlike for most services that have Intercom + FAQs, Aiven seems to actually make the proper use of them - the workflow of

enter question in chat ->

it finds related FAQs with answers ->

you can continue chatting if you have additional questions

is actually working. The answers in the KB are up to date and cut-to-the-chase. When we've had less frequent issues, someone has responded to us quickly enough and rectified existing issues. So in short, support + troubleshooting is top-notch. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about Aiven for PostgreSQL?

There seems to be an overall lack of flexibility for configuring instances. It gives the feeling of "hm, I hope Aiven is good choice because what if we need to change this one parameter later on / run this extension in a different mode", etc. More concretely, it would be awesome to see

- custom machines, rather than pre-built ones (or a screen that lets you price estimate a custom build + request to migrate to that)

- more fine-grain control over the machine (pgtune type-of-stuff), being able to run profiling (eg iotop) on the machine, etc. I realise it's hard to do a lot of this for a managed instance, but it would reduce the vendor lock-in feeling. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you like best about Aiven for PostgreSQL?

Having had various questions on PostgreSQL in general and with setting up different services on aiven, I have found that the support team has been great at responding and providing very relevant and useful information. Aiven handles backups and provides many other functionalities that are useful for db management as well, which is great. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about Aiven for PostgreSQL?

It wasn't clear sometimes what functionalities were available through the API, such as forking a service. This option is available in the UI and also the API, but I found this out on the aiven chat. It would be great to document all these fully in the api docs. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you like best about Aiven for PostgreSQL?

Reason for choosing Aiven was primarily their willingness to include new technologies, specifically the TimeScale plugin. A stable, scalable and secure platform, guaranteed to reside inside the EU with professional services available also played a key role. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about Aiven for PostgreSQL?

Pricing scheme is difficult to work / budget with. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you like best about Aiven for PostgreSQL?

TimescaleDB is available for Postgres; we can specify a cloud+region of our choice; the dashboards and help pages provide an excellent level of detail; the pricing structure is clear. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about Aiven for PostgreSQL?

Nothing, but I have some suggestions, if I may:

1. We only found out you offer TimescaleDB from a Tweet that I happened to find via Google. For us, this is a killer feature, but it was not obvious that you offered it :-)

2. Extremely minor: when I download Kafka credentials (CA, cert, key) it's not immediately obvious which file is for what purpose, or which project/service. May I suggest renaming them as follows (sorry if the formatting is lost when you read this):

ca.pem --> <projectName>-ca.pem

service.cert --> <projectName>-<serviceName>-client.cert

service.key --> <projectName>-<serviceName>-private.key

This makes it super obvious what each file is for. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you like best about Aiven for PostgreSQL?

Step by step backups are awesome. Several times saved my life by going pack some minutes. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about Aiven for PostgreSQL?

Postgress user management shuould be easier, now have to do it in the command line Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you like best about Aiven for PostgreSQL?

- VPC peering feature within cloud provider

- Database pooling feature

- High Availability Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about Aiven for PostgreSQL?

- No download logs button for downloading a log for specific time frame

- Integration with external (non-aiven) elasticsearch for log streamings Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you like best about Aiven for PostgreSQL?

The fully managed services. Before I would have to setup Elasticsearch or Redis on our own cluster, and setup all the backing up myself. Also I mainly switched because that's the only way I could have a fully managed PostgreSQL with TimescaleDB extension. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about Aiven for PostgreSQL?

The Pricing is a little on the heavy side. I think you guys run on 2x (100%) margin on top of the raw Cloud Costs. Which is understandable, I don't know how much work has went into developing your products. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.