I wish engineers would stop treating technology like fashion. PostgreSQL has been solid for decades. Don't care whether anyone thinks it is "cool".
When did Postgres become cool?
101–110 of 182 posts
Re: When did Postgres become cool?
#102One thing that made me slightly iffy in one of the usecases Postgres would be a no brainer is the need to vacuum for dead tuples. I was quite sketched by it and instead opted for traditional NoSQL stack. I wonder how people with large volumes of UPSERTs deal with vacuuming, isn’t it a huge operational burden?
Re: When did Postgres become cool?
#103If you were paying attention, postgres always the better option, based on my experience starting around 2002 or so. MySQL had the better marketing in its name and was arguably a bit easier to get going from the start, but postgres was always more advanced and IMHO once you got past the most basic usage made a lot more sense in how it's configured. The fact that it was the M in the LAMP stack gave it a huge edge too.…
In the early 2000s, MySQL was:
- way easier to install
- way easier to maintain (not vacuuming, etc)
- and had a replication story.
So you had startups which created their MVP on some shared webhost, which had MySQL and nearly non had pg. as those startups graduated into enterprise fame, they never left MySQL but instead fixed its problems along the way.
Re: When did Postgres become cool?
#104Just my 2 cents and I generally agree with the sentiment in the comments about Postgres just being rock solid reliable and having great integrations / vendor neutral.
One of the huge benefits I see with Postgres is its extension system. PostGIS is amazing. Can save any company that needs to do heavy geospatial processing $$$ by dodging ESRI. The only database I've found that handles geospatial stuff better is BigQuery, but considering the revolution that was Google Maps over the best decade I don't think that would really surprise anyone.
Re: When did Postgres become cool?
#105I jumped ship from MySQL/MariaDB around psql 9.6 and haven't looked back.
Re: When did Postgres become cool?
#106I've been running postgres since, I think, 2008. Mainly I don't like MSFT in general (although I admit VS Code and WSL are pretty cool). I tried MySQL on my first blog and a couple projects and it just seemed too be a bit to chaotic (how many engines do you need?), then a bit too gross (post acquisition). Some of the guys I work with use MariaDB, but at this point I've met Michael Stonebraker and some hardcore postgr…
Hey, unrelated to DBs, but my view is WSL is boring, seems a VM with mounts, but wine feels much cooler. Interesting view with cloud vendors, there does seem to be a shift from traditional LAMP stack.
What you have to understand about WSL is that it relies on one of the three userspaces that the NT/VMS kernel was designed to offer: Win32, POSIX, and OS/2.
Cygwin and busybox performance is awful in code that calls fork() often, but I understand that WSL1 behavior is very different, because fork() isn't fighting through layers of Windows.
The reason that the POSIX layer exists in NT is that Microsoft was the largest UNIX vendor in the early 80s with their XENIX variant, where the largest market segment ran on the TRS-80 Model 2 (68k-based, 3 simultaneous users, two attached rs-232 terminals).
"Broad software compatibility was initially achieved with support for several API "personalities", including Windows API, POSIX, and OS/2 APIs – the latter two were phased out starting with Windows XP."
Re: When did Postgres become cool?
#107I know I made the decision in 2012 or so. The startup I was working at used Postgres for the server, and I didn't know anything about databases, so, okay, fine, whatever. Then they started an analytics team, which went with MySQL ... and ended up discovering that MySQL only handled up to 3-byte characters of UTF-8, which was a problem since the users of our game Chinese characters and lots of creative abuses of Unico…
MySQL had utf8mb4 support in 2010, but to be fair it wasn’t the default, and also depending on the row format indexing cols using it wasn’t possible. Like everything with MySQL, there were and are endless gotchas. Once you learn most of them it’s incredibly performant (and ProxySQL in front of it is amazing, and has way more capabilities than just connection pooling), but it’s definitely full of footguns.
Does any MySQL variant have a page like this?
Re: When did Postgres become cool?
#108An interesting reason I became intrigued with Postgres in the early 2000s was the license it was/is distributed under. The situation involved some work for a customer that needed to distribute an RDBMS along with their software. The customer had more apprehension around the GPLv2-licensed MySQL than the BSD-esque PostgreSQL License [0], so we went with Postgres.
I later continued using Postgres in my career after having done quite a variety of benchmarks and came to the conclusion that it, in general, scaled more linearly across additional CPUs than MySQL's InnoDB engine did at the time.
[0] PostgreSQL License: https://www.postgresql.org/about/licence/
Re: When did Postgres become cool?
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hey, unrelated to DBs, but my view is WSL is boring, seems a VM with mounts, but wine feels much cooler. Interesting view with cloud vendors, there does seem to be a shift from traditional LAMP stack.
What you have to understand about WSL is that it relies on one of the three userspaces that the NT/VMS kernel was designed to offer: Win32, POSIX, and OS/2. Cygwin and busybox performance is awful in code that calls fork() often, but I understand that WSL1 behavior is very different, because fork() isn't fighting through layers of Windows. The reason that the POSIX layer exists in NT is that Microsoft was the largest…
My understanding was that POSIX was added to qualify for government contracts that required a FIPS-1512 compliant OS and had little to do with their UNIX business which was taken over by SCO in 1987.
My mental model is that they shed any UNIX business to focus on Windows, but then POSIX happened and they had to provide something in the market to meet the requirement.
Re: When did Postgres become cool?
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hey, unrelated to DBs, but my view is WSL is boring, seems a VM with mounts, but wine feels much cooler. Interesting view with cloud vendors, there does seem to be a shift from traditional LAMP stack.
What you have to understand about WSL is that it relies on one of the three userspaces that the NT/VMS kernel was designed to offer: Win32, POSIX, and OS/2. Cygwin and busybox performance is awful in code that calls fork() often, but I understand that WSL1 behavior is very different, because fork() isn't fighting through layers of Windows. The reason that the POSIX layer exists in NT is that Microsoft was the largest…
That’s only for WSL1. WSL2 is “just” a VM, which I’m sad about.