Things I hate about PostgreSQL (2020)
rbranson.medium.com
Things I hate about PostgreSQL (2020)
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Re: Things I hate about PostgreSQL (2020)
#2I will add one minor point to this list:
The name.
To this day I am convinced that the Hazapard UpperCASE usage is what has granted us:
- A database called PostgreSQL
- A library called libpostgres
- An app folder called postgres
- An executable called psql
- A host of client libraries which chose to call themselves Pg or a variation.
Re: Things I hate about PostgreSQL (2020)
#3I will add one minor point to this list: The name. To this day I am convinced that the Hazapard UpperCASE usage is what has granted us: - A database called PostgreSQL - A library called libpostgres - An app folder called postgres - An executable called psql - A host of client libraries which chose to call themselves Pg or a variation.
Don’t forget “libpq”
Re: Things I hate about PostgreSQL (2020)
#4The first paragraph,
> Over the last few years, the software development community’s love affair with the popular open-source relational database has reached a bit of a fever pitch. This Hacker News thread covering a piece titled “PostgreSQL is the worlds’ best database”, busting at the seams with fawning sycophants lavishing unconditional praise, is a perfect example of this phenomenon.
is exactly the kind of gratuitous over the top statement that makes me immediately lose respect for the author.
And the skimming the rest of the article, most the the "points" are just complaints about the tradeoffs made in various design decisions like MVCC, heap tables with indexes on the side, etc. The author is basically complaining "it's not MySQL".
Don't waste your time with this article.
Re: Things I hate about PostgreSQL (2020)
#5I will add one minor point to this list: The name. To this day I am convinced that the Hazapard UpperCASE usage is what has granted us: - A database called PostgreSQL - A library called libpostgres - An app folder called postgres - An executable called psql - A host of client libraries which chose to call themselves Pg or a variation.
Don’t forget “libpq”
Funfact: PQ is short for toilet paper in French
So libpq always cracks me up. But then again there's a theorem prover called Coq (which is indeed pronounced as you imagine, it means rooster) and it's been named by French researchers at INRIA!
Re: Things I hate about PostgreSQL (2020)
#6Earlier quoted context omitted.
Don’t forget “libpq”
Funfact: PQ is short for toilet paper in French So libpq always cracks me up. But then again there's a theorem prover called Coq (which is indeed pronounced as you imagine, it means rooster) and it's been named by French researchers at INRIA!
libcaca, also french: http://caca.zoy.org/
Re: Things I hate about PostgreSQL (2020)
#7Like many developers, I've used postgresql unquestioningly for many years, say 10. But if you ask me, I've rarely have had to face stringent scaling or availability requirements.
Many deployments were a variation of AWS RDS or a similarly managed offering for HA. And they weren't exactly flawless.
So this article is good food for thought. Why are we using postgresql? Because of the features, developer-friendliness, and so on.
Does that align with actual customer requirements? Not necessarily.
This problem framing aligns well with other phenomena one can observe. i.e. many complexities in our industry are completely self-inflicted (some personal 'favorites': OOP, microservices, SPAs, graphql).
What if postgresql could be added to that list?
Note that I'm not necessarily questioning postgresql as a project, but instead, the hype process that can lead communities to unquestioningly adopt this or that product without making an actually informed assessment.
Re: Things I hate about PostgreSQL (2020)
#8I think it’s worth mentioning that most of these problems only occur at a scale that only top 1% of companies will reach. I’ve been using PostgreSQL for over a decade without reaching any of the mentioned scaling-related problems.
PostgreSQL is still the best general purpose database in my opinion, and you can then consider using something else for parts of your application if you have special needs. I’ve used Cassandra alongside PostgreSQL for massive write loads with great success.
Re: Things I hate about PostgreSQL (2020)
#9The first paragraph, > Over the last few years, the software development community’s love affair with the popular open-source relational database has reached a bit of a fever pitch. This Hacker News thread covering a piece titled “PostgreSQL is the worlds’ best database”, busting at the seams with fawning sycophants lavishing unconditional praise, is a perfect example of this phenomenon. is exactly the kind of gratui…
Ok, what do you say about this one?
> #9: Ridiculous No-Planner-Hints Dogma
One of these "query shifts" that the author mentions happened with a production database where I work. It was down for two days. The query planner used to like using index X but at some point decided it didn't want to use that and decided it wanted to do a table scan inside a loop instead. Meaning: one day a certain query was working fine, the next day the same query never finishes. In my opinion this is unacceptable.
What's your take?
Re: Things I hate about PostgreSQL (2020)
#10Like many developers, I've used postgresql unquestioningly for many years, say 10. But if you ask me, I've rarely have had to face stringent scaling or availability requirements. Many deployments were a variation of AWS RDS or a similarly managed offering for HA. And they weren't exactly flawless. So this article is good food for thought. Why are we using postgresql? Because of the features, developer-friendliness, a…
You have to put your data somewhere... are commercial database vendors or nosql solutions that much better?