Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Postgres 11 – A First Look

craigkerstiens.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 193 posts

Re: Postgres 11 – A First Look

#91

Post by petepete »

apapli wrote: post #58
akavel wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What syntax do you have in mind? Can you give sone example of what you see as easier in MySQL than Postgres? Genuinely curious, I don't have money in that game

I recall having to type /d from the command prompt to show databases (or something like that). I prefer “show databases”.

The standard way to do this would be to query `information_schema. tables`.

PostgreSQL's approach isn't the most intuitive but it's well documented and very powerful. A few aliases could probably help, it's good they've added `quit`/,`exit` this time around.

Re: Postgres 11 – A First Look

#92

Post by SSLy »

rgbrenner wrote: post #67
dotancohen wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why? Notice that parallel to MySQL's rise a particular loosely-typed, never-except, often-wrong programming language also became popular. To this day I feed my family with that language. The typical coder (not that I do not say "developer") who codes in PHP does not care about correctness. He does not understand why monetary values cannot be stored in floats, he does not know what bitwise manipulation is, he does n…

In fairness, some of this is historical baggage that MySQL got stuck with from it's early popularity. mSQL was a free/low cost SQL database in the early 90s. Originally it was an SQL translator built on top of Postgres (that used POSTQUEL). That was too slow (because Postgres had higher system requirements), so a new lightweight engine was developed for it.. and that's what later became MySQL. The point was a lightwe…

>Postgres only adopted SQL in response to mSQL's popularity.

What, then what did it use before?

Re: Postgres 11 – A First Look

#93

Post by rgbrenner »

SSLy wrote: post #92
rgbrenner wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In fairness, some of this is historical baggage that MySQL got stuck with from it's early popularity. mSQL was a free/low cost SQL database in the early 90s. Originally it was an SQL translator built on top of Postgres (that used POSTQUEL). That was too slow (because Postgres had higher system requirements), so a new lightweight engine was developed for it.. and that's what later became MySQL. The point was a lightwe…

>Postgres only adopted SQL in response to mSQL's popularity. What, then what did it use before?

It had two methods of retrieving data. The first was what was known as a navigational database: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Navigational_database

This was something that was popular back when you used tape to store data. A record contained navigational references that told you where the next record was, allowing you to fast forward the tape to that position without reading everything in between.

The 2nd was POSTQUEL, which was a QUEL language: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QUEL_query_languages POSTQUEL was the preferred and recommended way of querying postgres.

These were both on their way out even in the early years of Postgres (mid-80s). Navigational databases are from the 60s. SQL was invented at IBM in the early 70s, and adopted by Oracle and DB2 in late-70s, and by the mid-80s they had gained significant market share and most databases that used QUEL had moved to SQL around that time.

Re: Postgres 11 – A First Look

#94

Post by dtech »

apapli wrote: post #52
mrep wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100% naive question: why is mysql and their similars so popular then? Spanner and AWS Aurora base off of more mysql than postregsql from what I can tell. Why?

I’m no expert on this topic and have used both PG and MySQL. My preference is MySQL purely because the syntax is easier, or at least consistent with what I learned at uni in the late ‘90s. I also like MySQL workbench, although I’m sure there is an equivalent for PG I haven’t needed to look for one in recent years. If PG allowed me to use the same syntax as MySQL I’d probably switch, purely because experts and those w…

MySQL workbench is still 10.000 miles ahead of PgAdmin. About three years ago the latest iteration PgAdmin 4 came out, which I tried on and off for a few months but was so buggy it was unusable for me. It might have gotten better since then.

It's a shame, psql is awesome once you know enough to use it, but GUIs is how people start using RDMSes, and it's about the only thing that MySQL is clearly superior to PostgreSQL.

Re: Postgres 11 – A First Look

#95

Post by davidgould »

rgbrenner wrote: post #93
SSLy wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Postgres only adopted SQL in response to mSQL's popularity. What, then what did it use before?

It had two methods of retrieving data. The first was what was known as a navigational database: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Navigational_database This was something that was popular back when you used tape to store data. A record contained navigational references that told you where the next record was, allowing you to fast forward the tape to that position without reading everything in between. The 2nd was POSTQUE…

I've been involved with postgres from before it had SQL, at Ilustra we added SQL in a parallel effort to the postgresql open source project and I'm not sure I'd agree with your points:

Specifically, POSTQUEL was not really obsolete, it's just that the market had picked SQL by then. Compare the fates of git versus Mercurial. Mercurial is not obsolete, but git is the clear popularity winner.

Second, I don't recall at all a navigational interface to postgres and the idea that this was a primary access method in postgres is quite surprising. Do you have a reference for this? I'd be very curious to read it.

Re: Postgres 11 – A First Look

#96

Post by GordonS »

dtech wrote: post #94
apapli wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m no expert on this topic and have used both PG and MySQL. My preference is MySQL purely because the syntax is easier, or at least consistent with what I learned at uni in the late ‘90s. I also like MySQL workbench, although I’m sure there is an equivalent for PG I haven’t needed to look for one in recent years. If PG allowed me to use the same syntax as MySQL I’d probably switch, purely because experts and those w…

MySQL workbench is still 10.000 miles ahead of PgAdmin. About three years ago the latest iteration PgAdmin 4 came out, which I tried on and off for a few months but was so buggy it was unusable for me. It might have gotten better since then. It's a shame, psql is awesome once you know enough to use it, but GUIs is how people start using RDMSes, and it's about the only thing that MySQL is clearly superior to PostgreSQ…

PgAdmin recently became an in-browser tool, and is much improved - in particular, it no longer uses GBs of memory and 90% of my CPU!

Re: Postgres 11 – A First Look

#97

Post by LunaSea »

shrumm wrote: post #36

I’m already loving PG10’s native partitioning support. PG11 closes the loop on a few convenience features like being able to set foreign and primary keys at the master table level. With PG10 I can’t use ON CONFLICT clauses - looking forward to upgrading and sorting that out.

I encountered the same limitations as you while implementing partitioning a few months ago and it's possible to use ON CONFLICT if the unique index is set on the partitioned table.

So after initialising a new partition, I also create a unique index attached to that partition directly instead of the parent table.

Re: Postgres 11 – A First Look

#98

Post by sz4kerto »

gaius wrote: post #88
deytempo wrote: post #45

What are some reasons I might consider Postgres over MySQL when choosing a DB platform?

With Postgres you don't need MongoDB, InfluxDB, or any other trendy thing, Postgres does it all, and better than all the wannabes.

Is that really true? Postgres is great, but it doesn't cater for _all_ use cases. For example, horizontal scalability is -- understandably for an ACID RDBMS -- not as trivial as it is for some document stores.

Re: Postgres 11 – A First Look

#99

Post by StreamBright »

samcheng wrote: post #56
mrep wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100% naive question: why is mysql and their similars so popular then? Spanner and AWS Aurora base off of more mysql than postregsql from what I can tell. Why?

I used both of them, but migrated to Postgres permanently a decade ago. Early on in my career, the biggest selling point for Mysql was the excellent web admin tool "phpMyAdmin" - it really helped get applications off the ground, since the core of most modern systems is the data model. Users could modify data, without your needing to create a UI for that use case. It conveniently used the same stack as the rest of the…

There are tons of tools like phpMyAdmin for Postgres.

Re: Postgres 11 – A First Look

#100

Post by rgbrenner »

davidgould wrote: post #95
rgbrenner wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It had two methods of retrieving data. The first was what was known as a navigational database: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Navigational_database This was something that was popular back when you used tape to store data. A record contained navigational references that told you where the next record was, allowing you to fast forward the tape to that position without reading everything in between. The 2nd was POSTQUE…

I've been involved with postgres from before it had SQL, at Ilustra we added SQL in a parallel effort to the postgresql open source project and I'm not sure I'd agree with your points: Specifically, POSTQUEL was not really obsolete, it's just that the market had picked SQL by then. Compare the fates of git versus Mercurial. Mercurial is not obsolete, but git is the clear popularity winner. Second, I don't recall at a…

Sure, of course QUEL still worked... but Postgres was one of the last databases to use QUEL. It was pretty clear SQL won even when Postgre was just getting started (mid-80s). The Ingres project (that developed QUEL) ended by the time Postgres started (obviously, since the name is Postgres = Post Ingres). Ingres influenced Sybase, which switched to SQL in the late 80s. Ingres Corp even switched to SQL in the late 80s. What other databases using QUEL existed in the mid-90s?

POSTQUEL was definitely the primary interface to postgres. The navigational interface was an early Postgres feature. See page 3 and page 10 ("fast path") of Stonebraker's 1990 paper on the implementation of postgres: http://db.cs.berkeley.edu/papers/ERL-M90-34.pdf

Post reply on HN