PostgreSQL is the worlds’ best database
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PostgreSQL is the worlds’ best database
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Re: PostgreSQL is the worlds’ best database
#2This is advertising of course. But if I had to select an SQL DB postgres is my only choice.
Perhaps I don't know enough about databases and their differences.
Anyone have some pros and cons of others?
Like why would I pick MySQL, Microsoft, Oracle, Maria etc over Postgres?
Apart from support that you gotta pay for.
Re: PostgreSQL is the worlds’ best database
#3This is advertising of course. But if I had to select an SQL DB postgres is my only choice. Perhaps I don't know enough about databases and their differences. Anyone have some pros and cons of others? Like why would I pick MySQL, Microsoft, Oracle, Maria etc over Postgres? Apart from support that you gotta pay for.
Replication, failover and high availability are complicated matters. I believe there are other SQL databases that may be said to handle this better than PostgreSQL.
At the very least, CockroachDB is much simpler to set up and manage. Cannot vouch for its stability and complexity of abnormal emergency recoveries, though - haven't used it long enough, only had simplest outages (that it had handled flawlessly).
Re: PostgreSQL is the worlds’ best database
#4This is advertising of course. But if I had to select an SQL DB postgres is my only choice. Perhaps I don't know enough about databases and their differences. Anyone have some pros and cons of others? Like why would I pick MySQL, Microsoft, Oracle, Maria etc over Postgres? Apart from support that you gotta pay for.
Well, (unfortunately) plenty of applications support only one DB backend. For FOSS software, MySQL/MariaDB support is very common, and even if those apps support pgSQL it might be that pgSQL support is not as robust and well-tested as mysql.
And in plenty of situations, sqlite is perfectly adequate, and saves you from the extra work of managing yet another service.
But yes, I agree if I'd start from a blank sheet and need a network-accessible SQL DB, pgSQL would be my first choice. Now if I had some very high end requirements, maybe one of those big commercial DB's would have an advantage.
Re: PostgreSQL is the worlds’ best database
#5This is advertising of course. But if I had to select an SQL DB postgres is my only choice. Perhaps I don't know enough about databases and their differences. Anyone have some pros and cons of others? Like why would I pick MySQL, Microsoft, Oracle, Maria etc over Postgres? Apart from support that you gotta pay for.
Having worked with dozens of different databases over lots of years, I can certainly say that Postgres is my go-to _default_ database over all the other relational ones.
In the same way that Golang claims it's the 90% language ( https://talks.golang.org/2014/gocon-tokyo.slide#1 ), I'd say Postgres is the perfect 90% database.
However, we're still using at least four other databases in production, and the reason why is that because it's doing something of everything, there are lots of niches that it doesn't fill well. It's all about tradeoffs.
If you've got a Full Text Search problem, PG is "good enough", that is until you need to index more challenging languages like Korean or need more exotic scoring functions. For that, Elastic is better.
You can do small scale analytics on PG, but at larger sizes, the transactional setup gets in the way and you're better off with BigQuery/Redshift/Snowflake.
You can scale vertical pretty big these days, but if you need linear scalability while still guaranteeing single digit ms access, you're better off with ScyllaDB.
However, there isn't a single project I wouldn't not start on a Postgres these days, that's how much I love it.
Re: PostgreSQL is the worlds’ best database
#6This is advertising of course. But if I had to select an SQL DB postgres is my only choice. Perhaps I don't know enough about databases and their differences. Anyone have some pros and cons of others? Like why would I pick MySQL, Microsoft, Oracle, Maria etc over Postgres? Apart from support that you gotta pay for.
I did use MySQL/MariaDB in production for a couple of years, and now I'm using Postgres.
PG sure seems to have better foundations and generally a more engineered approach to everything. This leads to some noteworthy outcomes in the tooling or the developer UX, for example: PG won't allow a union type (like String or Integer) in query arguments. PGs query argument handling is rather simple (at least the stuff provided with libpq), it only allows positional arguments.
Sometimes, MySQL by extending or bending SQL here and there allows for some queries to be written terser, like an update+join over multiple tables. Also I did actually enjoy that MySQL had less advanced features, so it seemed to be easier to reason about performance and overall behaviour.
Re: PostgreSQL is the worlds’ best database
#7This is advertising of course. But if I had to select an SQL DB postgres is my only choice. Perhaps I don't know enough about databases and their differences. Anyone have some pros and cons of others? Like why would I pick MySQL, Microsoft, Oracle, Maria etc over Postgres? Apart from support that you gotta pay for.
One of Postgres's biggest pros (over other commonly used dbs in web dev) is Row Level Security. Controlling what data a user can access at the database rather than the application or as part of a query makes the application logic a lot simpler. That's a big win.
Re: PostgreSQL is the worlds’ best database
#8This is advertising of course. But if I had to select an SQL DB postgres is my only choice. Perhaps I don't know enough about databases and their differences. Anyone have some pros and cons of others? Like why would I pick MySQL, Microsoft, Oracle, Maria etc over Postgres? Apart from support that you gotta pay for.
SQLite is also extremely useful, but it fills a different niche. (One of SQLite's slogans is "SQLite does not compete with client/server databases. SQLite competes with fopen().")
Re: PostgreSQL is the worlds’ best database
#9[deleted]
Re: PostgreSQL is the worlds’ best database
#10This is advertising of course. But if I had to select an SQL DB postgres is my only choice. Perhaps I don't know enough about databases and their differences. Anyone have some pros and cons of others? Like why would I pick MySQL, Microsoft, Oracle, Maria etc over Postgres? Apart from support that you gotta pay for.
Replication, failover and high availability are complicated matters. I believe there are other SQL databases that may be said to handle this better than PostgreSQL. At the very least, CockroachDB is much simpler to set up and manage. Cannot vouch for its stability and complexity of abnormal emergency recoveries, though - haven't used it long enough, only had simplest outages (that it had handled flawlessly).
I've been following YugabyteDB ( https://www.yugabyte.com/ ) with interest for similar reasons. It's build on postgresql so it supports more features than CockroachDB. They just forked PG on top of their clustered document store. And the newest version (2.1) is production ready (their words).
Just haven't had the reason to dive in yet, but seems good. Their PR department just isn't as good as CockroachDBs one.