What’s so exciting about Postgres?

Note that 'Animats didn't comment on JS as a technology, he commented on the crowd.

In 2017 Bryan Cantrill gave a wonderful talk titled "Platform as a Reflection of Values: Joyent, Node.js and Beyond" https://vimeo.com/230142234 In it, he talks about how even though they liked JS as a technology, they came to realize that the values of the JS/Node.js community differed from their values at Joyent.

In the talk (at around 19:30), he identifies that in 2014 Joyent's core values wrt node.js were "debuggability", "robustness", and "stability"; while the core values of the broader node.js community were "approachability", "expressiveness", and "velocity". And there's nothing wrong with either of those sets values, but they're not the same!

With that lens, I'd characterize the parent comment as contrasting the PostgreSQL team's core value of "robustness" with the Javascript crowd's core value of "velocity". That's a distinction in values, not in technology.

Just chiming in to say, Andres above can answer this far more in detail than I can. I suspect most people that do hit this today 1. have not nearly as a bad pain from it and 2. recover in generally much more quickly than previously. Today vs. say Postgres 9.6 is a huge difference.

Features I miss in PostgreSQL:

- Support large number of connections (without external pooling tools) and stop starting a new process per connection (consumes huge amount of resources). Other DBMS works with threads instead of processes and don't have any issues.

- Easy to configure high availability with multiple nodes

Less important:

- Graph capabilities directly in PostgreSQL without extentions or something else

- Running a scheduling tasks directly in PostgreSQL without external tools (for example a script that removes old data from database).

- Supporting Temporal Tables

But overall I like PostgreSQL more than Oracle or SQL Server, even if I miss the above features.

It's a stereotype, and like a lot of stereotypes, it has a little bit of statistical truth, but I don't think it does justice for the excellent front-end engineers that do exist and whom I've worked with personally.

That said, there is some truth in it. The thing about the back end is that there's no satisfaction in it other than the satisfaction of doing it well and earning the esteem of peers, so most back end developers are paying attention to the quality of the code they write. The front end has other attractions as well, and many front-end developers start out focused on those attractions, and learn by experience (if they learn at all) that writing high quality code is related to the cool stuff that got them into programming in the first place.

> Most of that consists of MySQL being extremely permissive with what it allows you to do in your SQL. Many of those things are non-standard, and some are quite unsafe. Postgres not only prioritizes safety, it keeps the application developer honest.

This is incredibly important: if you use MySQL, unless you are extremely pedantic about using safe defaults and a safe-by-default ORM you will almost certainly end up in the position where migrating will be hard because you are going to need to rigorously test & remediate all of the areas where your code was relying on MySQL allowing erroneous code to run without errors and nobody ever looked at the warnings.

I've even seen a few cases where people had data loss which had either gone unnoticed or been sporadic enough that they assumed it was user error or random corruption.