AWS DSQL (Postgres) with Next.js

Leerob describes DSQL as an early-preview, serverless distributed database compatible with much of PostgreSQL. He outlines active-active replication across three Availability Zones in one region or multiple regions, with strong consistency. The demo uses US East and US West, the only regions he says were available in the preview.

Leerob creates a DSQL database in the AWS console and connects with a short-lived authentication token that expires after 15 minutes. In the app, the DSQL Signer generates a token for a Node.js connection pool, which Drizzle uses for queries. Vercel OpenID Connect lets the app assume an AWS IAM role without storing long-lived access keys in project environment variables.

The app stores movies, sessions, and votes, and uses a cookie to keep track of whether a visitor has voted. Leerob notes that the preview did not support extensions or adding indexes after database creation, which made searching 5,000 movies harder. The Next.js app fetches data in server components and uses React 19’s useOptimistic to update vote counts while the server action writes to the database.

The page uses a Suspense boundary to separate static content from dynamic movie results, with experimental Next.js partial pre-rendering flags enabled in the demo. After a vote, revalidatePath refreshes the server-rendered data. Leerob also shows Vercel function observability for latency, errors, external calls, and concurrency, which he says can reduce compute costs by up to 50 or 60% for some workloads.

Leerob says DSQL looks promising but is too early to assess fully: some PostgreSQL features were missing, and pricing had not been announced. He plans to keep watching as the product develops.