Eskildsen: Neon retrofitted Postgres for S3, while Turbopuffer built pure object-storage consensus
Simon Eskildsen · Retrieval After RAG: Hybrid Search, Agents, and Database Design — Simon Eskildsen of Turbopuffer · Mar 12, 2026 · at 16:38
Simon Eskildsen, founder of Turbopuffer, compares Turbopuffer's ground-up object-storage architecture against Neon's Postgres decoupling approach.
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“I think neon neon was first to, and they're trying to retrofit it onto Postgres. And then they built this whole architecture where you have it in memory, and then you sort of like, you know, mmap back to S-III, and I think that was very novel at the time to do it for OLTP, but I hadn't seen a database that was truly all in, right? Not retrofitting it. The database built purely for this. No consensus layer, even using compare and swap on object stories to do consensus.”
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