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What’s so exciting about Postgres?

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Re: What’s so exciting about Postgres?

#111

Post by spacemanmatt »

erokar wrote: post #46
systemvoltage wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is often downvoted to talk about the "javascript crowd" on HN, but I've worked in software industry long enough to unequivocally and with certainty say that it totally lives up to the cliches. It never gets old to scold people that are not serious, disciplined and principled in their endeavors that affect the rest of the world. Javascript community absolutely deserves the avalanche of criticisms they face. It is t…

Typical bitter backend developer spew. Works with Java or C# and hasn't explored much more than OO and procedural. Threatened by anything new, creative or explorative. Stuck in his ways and prefers to do mundane, uncreative and repetetive tasks, like writing boilerplate to get stuff in and out of a database. Soon to be automated away by serverless.

Typical frontend developer spew. Works with JavaScript or Emscripten, hasn't dealt with data integrity, scale, or security challenges. Threatened by people who build things from scratch. Stuck writing handlers, never to see the whole architecture. Soon to be replaced by GPT-3.

Thank you, this has been entertaining.

Re: What’s so exciting about Postgres?

#112

Post by noir_lord »

spacemanmatt wrote: post #108
watermelon59 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That or they use something but clearly don't understand the thing they are using. You know, I feel like this has bled into backend development too. And it's not entirely the fault of engineers... or so I like to think, to excuse myself :P What worries me a lot is that I find myself being one of those people, not being able to fully help my situation. It's just... too much. It seems like every few months a new thing…

I have been working with a guy who constantly avoids popular libraries. Constantly. And his product is constantly more accurate (factored, few bugs) and then he can document it without referring to any outside sources. It's pretty good discipline to write things yourself and only grow into libraries when you have proven you know what you need.

That is where the nuance lies, in not reaching immediately for a library when you have a problem, explore the problem until you understand the solution then you know if the library is a good fit or not.

Half my battles with my team are them wanting to pull in dependencies, sometimes it's crazy like a wrapper dependency to pull in a different dependency when it's simpler to just pull in the indirect dependency and use it directly.

It's very much a thing that comes from experience though, when you've been bitten by upstream enough to be a little circumspect about it.

Re: What’s so exciting about Postgres?

#113

Post by api »

chousuke wrote: post #70
api wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The whole VACUUM paradigm is the biggest thing that bugs me about pgsql. The fact that it can actually freeze things always worries me. Can’t this happen constantly in the background like modern GCs?

It does, though? That's what autovacuum is, unless I'm missing something. It's just not always enough without tuning, just like GC.

We have had a lot of problems with frequently updated tables. Is auto tuning really that hard? Or is pg’s philosophy not to “auto” anything?

Re: What’s so exciting about Postgres?

#114

Post by api »

tinkertamper wrote: post #94
api wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ooh, permanent lock in to a single company’s bill by the second mainframe! How exciting!

I see this criticism a lot for serverless but I don’t see it in reality. Serverless is still just running code, the only part that wouldn’t be portable is the entrypoint data structure which is amounts to practically nothing.

The devil is in the details. How many little things would need to be changed, refactored, or rewritten to move to another host?

Re: What’s so exciting about Postgres?

#115

Post by acdha »

nomad543 wrote: post #96
acdha wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Under InnoDB, because we’re not talking about file corruption but cases where MySQL would silently and irreversibly discard data rather than throwing an error. For example, inserting a value which is too large for the target data type - it truncates the value so that value is lost unless you have another copy or way to reconstruct it.

People always criticize MySQL, then when asked what is the problem, they always mention the same thing about column length, which is just a default that can easily be changed and it's not even the default anymore for years.

That’s the easiest thing to mention but it’s far from the only one I’ve encountered from using MySQL since the late 90s. The reason things like this keep getting mentioned is that they keep breaking databases: it’s like trying to excuse all of the salmonella cases at a restaurant which serves undercooked chicken because you can remember to order it fully cooked.

In 1998, MySQL was appealing because it was very fast on simple queries and didn’t cost a further. Until the early 2010s it had a better replication story than Postgres. But by now it’s often slower than Postgres on my apps, feature poor, and you don’t notice how many limitations you’ve internalized until you realize it’s been years since you had to repair or kludge around a MySQL quirk.

Re: What’s so exciting about Postgres?

#116

Post by ryanbrunner »

redis_mlc wrote: post #84
pmiller2 wrote: post #60

This was a really good article, and thank you @jerodsanto for submitting it. I learned probably 6-7 big things about Postgres reading it that I didn't know before. I won't list out those things, because, I'm sure it wouldn't be relevant to most people reading this comment. :). But, there are a couple things I noticed that I do want to mention: > There were these edge cases in there, where it’s kind of like less safe.…

> I'd rather have my database complain than do stuff that could lose data. One great example is when you try to stuff more characters into a text field than it can accommodate. By default, MySQL just truncates the string silently; Postgres just doesn't allow it. That's your opinion, but the truth is not necessarily black and white. Postgres will probably lose more data in your case when the application developer does…

> Postgres will probably lose more data in your case when the application developer doesn't handle the exception for a text field too long, and loses the whole row. (If you're an application developer, you should audit your code now.)

The thing is, you'll noisily lose your data, which is far more likely to be caught and corrected. Even the most roughly put together web app is probably going to have some mechanism to alert about server-side production errors.

> A well-written application using Postgres would have to truncate the data before insert, achieving the same result as having MySQL auto-truncation, but with more initial and on-going maintenance effort in the case of Postgres.

Not necessarily - you could alert the user that they need to provide less data, or mitigate it in some other way (maybe storing a summary and the full version in a blob somewhere).

Re: What’s so exciting about Postgres?

#117

Post by boredpenguin »

snthd wrote: post #107

>[unintelligible 00:08:02.01] "is to go hack on" >[unintelligible 00:09:07.07] "lemming status of developers" >[unintelligible 00:19:16.22] "laying in" >[unintelligible 00:27:29.18] "tables" >[unintelligible 00:30:14.16]] "recompete"

> Our transcripts are open source[0] on GitHub. Improvements are welcome.

Looks like you (or anyone else) can directly contribute these corrections

[0] https://github.com/thechangelog/transcripts/blob/master/podc...

Re: What’s so exciting about Postgres?

#118

Post by golergka »

> There’s a professor from the University of Moscow that – I’m not sure if he still teaches, or used to teach on astrophysics, and then hacks on Postgres for fun.

I'm pretty sure he's talking about Oleg Bartunov! He's one of the best speakers about Postgresql at Russian Highload conference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uhvqly8MtoI&list=PLH-XmS0lSi...

Re: What’s so exciting about Postgres?

#119

Post by edgyquant »

hashtagmarkup wrote: post #102
edgyquant wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No it isn’t though? JSON is used, by developers, as an intermediary to exchange data pulled from a db. Your point that json is proof that the GP comment is false is not even a point but some kind of fallacy akin to a strawman.

Your inference of my intentions, as an intermediary to deflect from the facts presented, is proof that you're trying really hard to be edgy. Akin to a strawquant. The people behind javascript provided the object notation technology that has been absorbed by Postgres. It is not only being used to exchange data (as a standard text field would be used), but can be used to QUERY data. The database is aware not only of th…

I’m not being edgy you took a data format and pretended it was a refutation when it wasn’t and isn’t.

Re: What’s so exciting about Postgres?

#120

Post by hashtagmarkup »

edgyquant wrote: post #119
hashtagmarkup wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your inference of my intentions, as an intermediary to deflect from the facts presented, is proof that you're trying really hard to be edgy. Akin to a strawquant. The people behind javascript provided the object notation technology that has been absorbed by Postgres. It is not only being used to exchange data (as a standard text field would be used), but can be used to QUERY data. The database is aware not only of th…

I’m not being edgy you took a data format and pretended it was a refutation when it wasn’t and isn’t.

What does the JS in JSON stand for? Where did it come from?
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