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Why doesn't Quora use PostgreSQL

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31–40 of 78 posts

Re: Why doesn't Quora use PostgreSQL

#31
post #14
post #6

This is a common mistake people make, I think. Just because an ecosystem is smaller does not mean it is inferior (or less practical). In fact, the opposite is routinely true. Is it harder to find tutorials for PostgreSQL? Yeah, maybe. Is it harder to get high-quality advice and resources from subject matter experts? No; in fact, it's far easier. I have used PostgreSQL for many years and in all of them every question…

That's really interesting to know, actually. I've only been with companies that had MySQL installations (Facebook and Twitter) and so jumping in was really easy, but on the other hand I do like to do things right. A few questions, though: 0/ How would I be able to tell if the limitations of our DB are because of MySQL and would be solved by PostgreSQL? That is, common pain points in MySQL that we wouldn't recognize i…

http://www.postgresql.org/support/professional_support is good place to look for consulting firms.

Both http://www.pgexperts.com/ and http://www.enterprisedb.com/ are run by core PostgreSQL developers.

Re: Why doesn't Quora use PostgreSQL

#32
post #17

there's one useful thing about postgresql: specifically, interviewees that inform you you should be using postgresql can be immediately rejected. "do you use mysql or postgresql?" "oh, mys-" "YOU SHOULD SWITCH TO POSTGRESQL!!"

I think this can be extended to any interviewee who starts redesigning your stack before they're even hired can be rejected.

Totally true. Anybody who is a fanboy of a certain technology is not a good hire. It's always good to have passionate people, but passionate about an idea, not a tool. The bottom line is that in most cases, it doesn't even matter, just as long as things are getting done. If the people you work with don't appreciate that, you've got deeper problems.

Re: Why doesn't Quora use PostgreSQL

#33
Is quora flooding their own site with self-posed questions trying to get publicity and rankings? The only time I've ever heard of it is from the oxygen of publicity HN seems to give it.

Re: Why doesn't Quora use PostgreSQL

#34
Ok. Being borderline trollish here, but if I read this article, this means to me "yeah. we are using a technically inferior solution and thus risking data loss and increasing the workload on our developers because our HR department gets more resumes if we search for an in-house database specialist".

Postgres usually does its thing and does it well. You usually don't get weirdness that requires you to even hire a specialist. And if you do, the consultants around are great and actually understand the problem.

As other people here have said: If you find someone listing PostgreSQL experience on their resume, you know they have the experience. If you find somebody listing MySQL, you'd have to check whether they are just listing it because they have heard of it or whether they really understand the problem domain.

So. DB specialists are settled. What about developers? PostgreSQL and MySQL are close enough in what SQL constructs they support (no wonder - MySQL provides a subset of SQL anyways), so coming from MySQL to PostgreSQL usually is trivial and the few things that are unsupported unix_timestamp() for example, you can write wrappers for if you really need them.

Of course, developers will at first find it strange that they can't, for example insert a 200 characters string into a varchar(10) column, but even the most braindead developer sooner or later will understand that silently truncating data usually is a bad thing.

No. The arguments listed in that article are just fear of the unknown and total non-issues (in german, there's this saying: "Was der Bauer nicht kennt, das frisst er nicht" - ever so true).

I'm glad I can work with PostgreSQL day-in, day-out. I'm glad I migrated that huge application from MySQL to Postgres back in 2000. I'm glad I did not touch MySQL for serious stuff ever since then.

I understand if you need to use MySQL if you want to run some software that runs only on MySQL. But if you are writing your own application, there's just no reason not to got with the real RDBMS.

/rant.

Re: Why doesn't Quora use PostgreSQL

#35
post #6

This is a common mistake people make, I think. Just because an ecosystem is smaller does not mean it is inferior (or less practical). In fact, the opposite is routinely true. Is it harder to find tutorials for PostgreSQL? Yeah, maybe. Is it harder to get high-quality advice and resources from subject matter experts? No; in fact, it's far easier. I have used PostgreSQL for many years and in all of them every question…

My guess is that a small ecosystem is bad for pretty much everything other than databases: - Programming languages have libraries - Frameworks have plugins - Operating systems have compatibility issues The best code is the code you don't have to write.

There are a lot of "positive network externalities" in the computer world: the more people use something, the more valuable it is. That's true for databases as well.

However, what he's saying is that beyond a certain point, those effects tend to become a bit less important. Java is more popular than Python, for instance, but you can get pretty much anything done that you need to in Python. OTOH, a language like Erlang (sorry to pick on it, it's just an example) is still fringe enough that there are gaps in its libraries, it's tough to find people, and so on.

Re: Why doesn't Quora use PostgreSQL

#36
post #19

It's interesting to see how PostgresSQL didn't get nowhere near the popularity of MySQL. I think a few major things contributed to this: 1) MySQL focused on performance first while PostgresSQL positioned themselves as "feature-complete." Of course, that was years ago and in the meantime they became comparable in both aspects. MySQL+InnoDB is ACID compliant and Postgres matches the InnoDB performance. Sure, Postgres m…

I think having a "launch" at the right time might have had some impact also. MySQL launched in 1995, right around the time that the idea of generating hypertext dynamically was taking off, so a bunch of web stuff was looking for a lightweight, fast DB without necessarily a lot of features. Postgres had been around since the 1980s as a research project, and in 1994 was publicly released as an open-source project and a…

Most people don’t realize how bad postgress was at that time.

I tried postgress in 1995-96. I was tiered of mSQL [M-SQL not MySQL] and really wanted a free SQL server to work at backend of our web apps. Downloaded, compiled and installed what was then called postgress95 on our linux server. And then I could connect to it from localhost using the command prompt. But the instant I connected with it from a remote machine over TCP/IP the server crashed! I really wanted to make it work, couldn't. Note that Internet was still very new and support availability wasn't as wide as today.

Discovered and started using mySQL which was then way better than mSQL, And still using it after 15 years.

Re: Why doesn't Quora use PostgreSQL

#37
post #19

It's interesting to see how PostgresSQL didn't get nowhere near the popularity of MySQL. I think a few major things contributed to this: 1) MySQL focused on performance first while PostgresSQL positioned themselves as "feature-complete." Of course, that was years ago and in the meantime they became comparable in both aspects. MySQL+InnoDB is ACID compliant and Postgres matches the InnoDB performance. Sure, Postgres m…

Most important of all: PHP.

I'd say most important is LAMP and that unfortunately Postgres starts with the letter P.

Re: Why doesn't Quora use PostgreSQL

#38
Those who commented in favor of postgres: What are some of the biggest deployments of postgres? Facebook has a gargantic deployment of MySQL and it just works. The author of the answer on Quora mentions reliable scalability as the most important factor for their MySQL choice on another answer here: http://bit.ly/dm6HtQ. What is the biggest system that postgres is deployed in?

Re: Why doesn't Quora use PostgreSQL

#39
post #19

It's interesting to see how PostgresSQL didn't get nowhere near the popularity of MySQL. I think a few major things contributed to this: 1) MySQL focused on performance first while PostgresSQL positioned themselves as "feature-complete." Of course, that was years ago and in the meantime they became comparable in both aspects. MySQL+InnoDB is ACID compliant and Postgres matches the InnoDB performance. Sure, Postgres m…

MySQL being easier to install on Windows from 1995 to 2005 might also have had something to do with it. PostreSQL had to be run in Cygwin until release 8.0 in 2005.

Re: Why doesn't Quora use PostgreSQL

#40
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe the postgres supporters can fill this in about Postgres reliability: http://www.quora.com/How-reliable-is-Postgres-replication that's one of the biggest issues scaring people away from Postgres.

The replication is reliable, it's just that with the 8.0 releases, it's an add-on and not obvious to setup (e.g with Slony have to do special procedures to properly replicate DDL changes, it required having triggers on replicated tables, etc). In 9.0 replication is built in, transparent, and trivial to setup.

Sorry, but pre-9.0, Postgres replication is neither reliable nor easy to setup/admin. It's absolutely the worst thing about (pre-9.0) Postgres, and I'm glad the core team finally caved and made it a first-class feature.

Slony caused us no end of problems (large postgres installations at Last.fm). It's a monumental pain in the ass, it will choke on something, probably when you're trying to make a DDL change, sometimes just at random. Docs/help on trying to figure out what went wrong and how to fix the replication are not easy to find. After you managed to 'fix' it, you will be unsure if the slave is truly in sync. The only way to be confident is to nuke the slave and start over to ensure you have a consistent replica.

That said, I'd still gladly suffer the trials and tribulations of crappy trigger based replication than use MySQL.

I'm looking forward to trying replication in 9.0, it sounds fantastic.

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