Live data from Hacker News

PostgreSQL is the worlds’ best database

2ndquadrant.com

81–90 of 365 posts

Re: PostgreSQL is the worlds’ best database

#81
i wish there was a management layer that runs and operates high availability postgres databases on AWS/GCP/Azure...but is significantly cheaper.

AWS RDS makes it impossible to export snapshots to s3 (because the native snapshot storage is super expensive).

EC2 m5.xlarge w/ 5000 GB storage costs 700$ RDS db.m5.xlarge w/ 5000 GB costs 1000$

Why is there no SAAS that lets me BYO my own EC2 and just runs and gives me a dashboardy experience ESPECIALLY for snapshots and restores ?

Re: PostgreSQL is the worlds’ best database

#82
post #2

This 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.

Oracle is currently moving in the direction of autonomous databases. It's no longer just about having great automation features but about the database being able to do things for you like create or drop an index in order to improve ETL performance, and it's all done autonomously.

Oracle has not managed the shift to cloud so if you look at where the puck is going, it's moving away from Oracle.

Re: PostgreSQL is the worlds’ best database

#83
post #60
post #56

Having migrated a postgres database to dynamodb, I would say that I'm never going to use postgres again. The problem with all SQL databases is that they are too easy to query and use. You add all kinds of select queries, joins and foreign keys and when traffic hits scramble to make it scale. NoSQL is hard to design but you can atleast be sure that once traffic hits, you don't have to redesign the schema to make it sc…

> You add all kinds of select queries, joins and foreign keys and when traffic hits scramble to make it scale. NoSQL is hard to design but you can atleast be sure that once traffic hits, you don't have to redesign the schema to make it scale. Surely this depends on how you set up your SQL database to begin with? I'm not familiar with NoSQL, so can you explain why "schemas" aren't necessary and scaling happens automat…

You could design a SQL database to be denormalized from the start, but then you are losing many of the advantages of a SQL database.

I never said that schemas aren't necessary, just that using a strict NoSQL database forces you to think about scaling constraints early. This avoids(atleast partially) a schema redesign later.

Re: PostgreSQL is the worlds’ best database

#84
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But that also means that: - the code is not reusable outside of a database setting. So not cacheable. - the code is not reusable accross different storage layers. So not portable. - the code may needs updating if the schema change, you can't abstract that - changing the logic means a db migration - testing the code requires a DB - tooling support to check that code si limited to SQL tooling, which is very weak, espec…

I agree, but I also see the benefits from the other side, so I’ll play devil’s advocate:

- it is cached, in the database’s memory, where the cache can be invalidated automatically. It is better to cache views than data anyway.

- it is portable to every platform postgres runs, which in practice means it will run everywhere. Portability between databases is overrated because it rarely happens in practice.

- the access control logic evolves together with the schema, guaranteeing they have an exact correspondence. This is a good thing.

- integration tests should involve a live database

- have you looked at jetbrains datagrip?

Re: PostgreSQL is the worlds’ best database

#85

i wish there was a management layer that runs and operates high availability postgres databases on AWS/GCP/Azure...but is significantly cheaper. AWS RDS makes it impossible to export snapshots to s3 (because the native snapshot storage is super expensive). EC2 m5.xlarge w/ 5000 GB storage costs 700$ RDS db.m5.xlarge w/ 5000 GB costs 1000$ Why is there no SAAS that lets me BYO my own EC2 and just runs and gives me a d…

Sounds like https://scalegrid.io/ could fit your use case

Re: PostgreSQL is the worlds’ best database

#87
post #2

This 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.

We picked SQL server by Microsoft for one of our projects because it was easier to integrate it when we started (ASP.NET core 2.0) and it has very nice tools like SSMS, better than DBeaver. For a new project we picked Postgres. We might in the future use any of the two.

We also have other DB tech in the company: Teradata, Oracle, Redis, Cassandra.

Re: PostgreSQL is the worlds’ best database

#88
Idk, I'm very pro-PostgreSQL but MySQL/InnoDB used to have that one feature for easy replication via logical DB updates (sending UPDATES to replicas) whereas PostgreSQL support for this was considered lacking, using binary block updates instead if I'm remembering correctly. Also, MySQL, with replication, was considered easier to setup and manage by your average web shop. That may be a thing of the past, though.

Edit: also, best for what? SQLite is, in a way, the perfect DB is you don't have concurrent writes, and I've worked with vector databases (think bitmap indices on steroids) that totally outclass eg. Oracle and PostgreSQL for analytics-heavy workloads

Re: PostgreSQL is the worlds’ best database

#89
post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oracle is currently moving in the direction of autonomous databases. It's no longer just about having great automation features but about the database being able to do things for you like create or drop an index in order to improve ETL performance, and it's all done autonomously.

Oracle has not managed the shift to cloud so if you look at where the puck is going, it's moving away from Oracle.

Oracle has their own cloud platform and a great database to go along with it, if anything history has shown us that Oracle is able to adapt their database offerings to cater to current enterprise needs and I think this time will be no different.

Re: PostgreSQL is the worlds’ best database

#90

Idk, I'm very pro-PostgreSQL but MySQL/InnoDB used to have that one feature for easy replication via logical DB updates (sending UPDATES to replicas) whereas PostgreSQL support for this was considered lacking, using binary block updates instead if I'm remembering correctly. Also, MySQL, with replication, was considered easier to setup and manage by your average web shop. That may be a thing of the past, though. Edit:…

That used to be the case, but it's not anymore. Postgresql has logical replication built-in since Postgresql 10 (released 2017-10-05). It's really simple to run these days and the docs are great [0]

[0] https://www.postgresql.org/docs/12/logical-replication.html

Post reply on HN