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When did Postgres become cool?

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Re: When did Postgres become cool?

#111

Post by chasil »

avereveard wrote: post #72

About at the transition between oracle 11 and 12, wmvare was quickly becoming the next big thing, and oracle licensing was causing concerns I don't precisely recall with virtual deployments. In conjunction with orm reaching good maturity and postgres starting to catch up with benchmark it was the perfect storm.

In a license audit, Oracle will charge you a full CPU license (currently $47,500/core for Enterprise) for every CPU in your VMware cluster, regardless if the database is running on it or not.

https://blogs.vmware.com/apps/2017/06/oracle-vmware-vsphere-...

Re: When did Postgres become cool?

#113

Post by martincmartin »

kevstev wrote: post #100

If 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.…

But MongoDB is webscale.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2F-DItXtZs

Edit: what happened to highscalability.com?

Re: When did Postgres become cool?

#114

Post by jghn »

convolvatron wrote: post #69
jghn wrote: post #38

I remember in the early-mid aughts I evaluated Postgres vs MySQL. At the time the conventional wisdom seemed to be that Postgres was focusing more on robustness and MySQL more on functionality. And a lot of people seemed to prefer MySQL because of this. When I looped back around several years later Postgres had started to overcome MySQL. Conventional wisdom then was it was roughly at feature parity with MySQL but mor…

Postgres started in 1986. its was never less featureful than MySQL...in fact MySQL tried to get by without _transactions_ for the longest time. the fact that MySQL had more market/mindshare at any point is more of a testament about crowd mentality than anything about either of the two databases.

Sorry - I said functionality but meant performance. Doesn't look I can edit my post anymore. I don't know if that was even true, but that was what the wisdom of the crowds said at the time.

Re: When did Postgres become cool?

#115

Post by chasil »

jonhohle wrote: post #109
chasil wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Were this to be true, and they intended immediate death for this whole layer, then a) "Windows Services for UNIX" would never have existed, and b) the famous argument with David Korn over the quality of their port of his shell would never have happened.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Services_for_UNIX

https://m.slashdot.org/story/16351

In any case, a "userspace personality" such as NT exhibits is not added quickly. The NT design began in the late 80's, and I think that something like a POSIX layer existed from the beginning.

Re: When did Postgres become cool?

#116

Post by bombcar »

alberth wrote: post #103
kevstev wrote: post #100

If 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.

MySQL was easy to install and had some notable footguns which you could work around.

PostgreSQL was more esoteric and lots of stuff wouldn’t directly support it or would only do so half heartedly.

So MySQL took off. But people programming against a database would lean towards pSQL.

Re: When did Postgres become cool?

#118

Post by CuriouslyC »

jghn wrote: post #114
convolvatron wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Postgres started in 1986. its was never less featureful than MySQL...in fact MySQL tried to get by without _transactions_ for the longest time. the fact that MySQL had more market/mindshare at any point is more of a testament about crowd mentality than anything about either of the two databases.

Sorry - I said functionality but meant performance. Doesn't look I can edit my post anymore. I don't know if that was even true, but that was what the wisdom of the crowds said at the time.

MySql did have better insert performance for a while, but this was due to unsafe defaults in conjunction with no transactions, which is only a good tradeoff if you're storing disposable data.

Re: When did Postgres become cool?

#119

Post by CuriouslyC »

gtowey wrote: post #46
sdsd wrote: post #44

When MySQL was purchased by Oracle. For a time, MariaDB was the new option, but its commitment to binary compatibility with MySQL made it feel bogged down. Fun fact: Julian Assange contributed code to PostgreSQL a long time ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18464671

This is the most direct explanation. The blog post avoids talking about this at all, but I'm guessing that's to keep the post informative and not let it degrade into a database flame war. As a MySQL DBA for the past 20 years it was practically the only choice until Oracle bought Sun, then it was instantly radioactive. A shame because the fears people had were unfounded and some of the best development work has been d…

Postgres already had cachet before Oracle bought MySql, but it was seen more as a small scale oracle replacement for people who were serious about data integrity or for lower volume OLTP work in the web sphere. The MySql acquisition coincided with performance gains by Postgres that made it more applicable to web scale OLTP workloads, and JSONB support was really the nail in the coffin.

Re: When did Postgres become cool?

#120

Post by johndalton »

bettercallsalad wrote: post #102

One 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?

For most folks autovacuum "Just Works", transparently and in the background. For people with large volumes of UPSERTs or similar workloads with lots of activity against existing rows, it may be necessary to tune autovacuum - usually to be more aggressive than the defaults. Aside from figuring out that this is a thing that can be done and then doing it (or paying someone to figure this out for you), there really isn't much operational burden involved.

I have seen cases where it made sense to run regularly scheduled vacuums outside of just leaving it all to autovacuum, but in my experience this is rare - when I see someone worrying about vacuums it's usually the case that they should just change an autovacuum knob and then forget about it.

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