161–170 of 365 posts
Ironically, the blog post shoots itself in the foot by starting with Postgres security. Postgres has very poor security compared to MySQL, and in fact, I tell companies implementing compliance policies to shift to MySQL. https://www.cvedetails.com/metasploit-modules/vendor-336/Pos... The reasons are: - Postgres' grant model is overly complex. I haven't seen anybody maintain the grants correctly in production for non-…
Can anyone recommend a good client for PostgreSQL?
[1] - I see that there have been some new releases in 2020 so I ought to check on them. The version I tried earlier was 4.11.
When I learned you cannot change the order of columns in PostgreSQL, it sounded like one of the smarter but slightly weird kid in a class room. On the other hand, MySQL, who's not as bright as the smarter kid, is easy to talk to and feels friendlier and is generally the more popular kid. I do appreciate the strictness of PostgreSQL but if I see small weird stuff, I tend to pick the one that is easier to get along wit…
I'll admit to not being an expert in databases, but I can't figure out why the order of columns in a database would be relevant, unless you're doing `select *` and indexing the resulting columns by number rather than name, which I've always found to be fragile to the point of being useless. What am I missing?
Sure, you can list the fields in the order you want in a SELECT statement, but that's tedious - it's handy to have something reasonable in the table definition.
There's a wiki page on the Postgres site:
https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Alter_column_position
talking about workarounds and a plan from 2006 on how they might implement that feature.
I think that PostgreSQL itself is great. However, the developer client tools (pgAdmin) leave something to be desired. The old pgAdmin3 was fine, if lacking bells and whistles. The new pgAdmin4 however, was not very good last time I tried it [1]. It was implemented as a client/server web application and had frequent issues. Can anyone recommend a good client for PostgreSQL? [1] - I see that there have been some new re…
Otherwise, TablePlus is cross-platform (and supports multiple DBs) https://tableplus.com/
Agreed that PgAdmin is awful.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 i…
I wouldn't say PostgreSQL was the analogue of golang: go's initial popular growth for being 'good enough' while being arguably oversimplified, where simplicity masks problems, under the pretence that YANGNI always applies (initial N emphasizing the Not of Aren't), seems much closer to MySQL's history. PG was driven by engineering correctness, by considering what DBAs 'Are Going to Need'. Sometimes that strictness wor…
For most of the projects where the DB really mattered, throughout my 10+ freelancer carrier, it came down to one thing that client really cared about. Performance. Nothing else mattered, not license price, not whistles and bells, not hype. My clients wanted to have data in front of their eyes the same second when they clicked the button. And when you have a table with 100 million rows in it, and an application is not…
It depends a lot on the implementation strategy. Some databases have GIS features, allowing you to query all points within a radius directly. I know oracle can do this, but it’s a paid addon (spatial and graph) and I don’t know how well it scales. On databases that have good scanning behavior you can use a geohash approach instead. Insert all points with a geohash as key, determine a geohash bounding box that roughly…
Geohashing has a lot of weaknesses and limitations, not really recommended unless your use case is very simple and not primarily geospatial in nature. The modern version was created in the 1990s and implemented by big database companies like Oracle and IBM (based on work in the 1960s and '70s). They deprecated that indexing feature in their database engines a long time ago for good technical reasons that apply to current open source implementations.
Geospatial index performance is very sensitive to temporal and geometry distribution, and the performance variance can be extremely high. For non-trivial applications, the real world will eventually produce data that inadvertently executes a denial of service attack on naive geospatial databases.
I think that PostgreSQL itself is great. However, the developer client tools (pgAdmin) leave something to be desired. The old pgAdmin3 was fine, if lacking bells and whistles. The new pgAdmin4 however, was not very good last time I tried it [1]. It was implemented as a client/server web application and had frequent issues. Can anyone recommend a good client for PostgreSQL? [1] - I see that there have been some new re…
It's not specific to PostgreSQL, it's universal.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the only reason I wouldn't choose Postgresql is if I need master-master replication. It's not that you can't create a master-master setup using Postgresql, I believe 2ndquadrant have and add-on that allows this. It just feels like it's messing with the fundamentals of the database on such a low level that I really only trust it, if it's part of Postgresql it self.
Logical replication has been in PostgreSQL itself for a while now. There are naturally caveats: sequences don't get replicated, so you need to configure each replica with a non-overlapping range for each sequence. And DDL statements are also not replicated, so you have to migrate database schemas by hand on each replica.
[1] https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Replication,_Clustering,_an...
I think that PostgreSQL itself is great. However, the developer client tools (pgAdmin) leave something to be desired. The old pgAdmin3 was fine, if lacking bells and whistles. The new pgAdmin4 however, was not very good last time I tried it [1]. It was implemented as a client/server web application and had frequent issues. Can anyone recommend a good client for PostgreSQL? [1] - I see that there have been some new re…
Native cross-platform and works across dozens of databases with lots of features.
Another option is Jetbrains DataGrip: https://www.jetbrains.com/datagrip/
For most of the projects where the DB really mattered, throughout my 10+ freelancer carrier, it came down to one thing that client really cared about. Performance. Nothing else mattered, not license price, not whistles and bells, not hype. My clients wanted to have data in front of their eyes the same second when they clicked the button. And when you have a table with 100 million rows in it, and an application is not…
It's not realistic that Postgres would outclass everything else like this.