I currently use MariaDB for my self-hosted application. Would I gain big advantages switching to PostgreSQL? My main reason for going with MySQL/MariaDB is the availability and ease of installation on most hosting providers.
The Great Migration from MongoDB to PostgreSQL
331–339 of 339 posts
Re: The Great Migration from MongoDB to PostgreSQL
#332Earlier quoted context omitted.
His words: "I am also self-taught. I never got a degree of any kind. I entered the industry at the tender age of 17 and never looked back. Frankly, school isn’t all it’s cracked up to be — especially in the software field." https://twitter.com/unclebobmartin/status/107212575854868889... Which means his opinions are more often than not uninformed opinions and should be taken with a grain of salt.
I think you overestimate college education a little too much. Having a degree doesn't make your opinions automatically better than those that didn't have the chance to get one. You wish it did, but it don't.
My remark is not about the quality of college education. It's about his mindset.
You don't need a college education to read research articles, books and journals. But you certainly need an open mind and some discipline to not try to reinvent the wheel all the time. You need to learn about the state of the art in your field.
Some ideas and algorithms are proven and battle tested, and people should learn about them, before trying to create something new and claim it is much better than the old thing. This is very noticeable in some fields like cryptography.
His modus operandi certainly seems to be on the other extreme, everything old is bad and the new thing around the corner is going to change everything. Which causes a lot of people who believe him to collectively waste millions of hours of their time.
About your comments on the degree... it really depends on how you got it. For most people, I would agree with you. A small group of people in academia are insanely smart and are focused on research.
Re: The Great Migration from MongoDB to PostgreSQL
#333"this hurt in particular because our data was very much relational." Umm... why would you not choose a relational engine to start with? This isn't said with the benefit of hindsight. I worked with Lotus 123 back in the early 90s. I get that there's value in document databases, but even then, there were limitations, and the need for the ability to have structured/related data in an engine that easily allowed for ad-ho…
> Umm... why would you not choose a relational engine to start with? There's typically two answers to this question: When they first started things were changing so quickly they didn't want to commit to a schema and felt like doing real data modeling would slow their velocity down so they dumped everything into Mongo and called it a day. Or they had someone on the team who insisted that Nosql was the way to go. They'…
Interestingly... I've never encountered the first scenario as a justification. I know it must exist, as I've read people describe it.
Every time I've been in a group where nosql was desired, it was because they saw it at a conference, or watched a youtube video, or read some blog extolling nosql virtues, and... yeah - that second option. They'd either never actually used nosql, or didn't realize what they were getting into, possibly because even if they'd used it, the larger architecture had SQL in it someplace, just outside what they could see.
Re: The Great Migration from MongoDB to PostgreSQL
#334I use MySQL for everything - always have. Can someone hit me with a few reasons why you would use Postgres over MySQL? I don’t have any familial affinity to any database, but I’m not sure what the benefits to Postgres are relative to MySQL.
I do scaling and performance work, mostly with Rails apps, but a significant amount of the work is database level and not language specific. I've used both postgres and MySQL (and a few other databases) going back to 2000. The best thing I can hear from a company when I start is "We use Postgres". If they're using postgres then I know there's likely a far smoother path to performance than with MySQL. It has better to…
Postgres does several things better than MySQL, but tooling isn't among them.
Re: The Great Migration from MongoDB to PostgreSQL
#335I use MySQL for everything - always have. Can someone hit me with a few reasons why you would use Postgres over MySQL? I don’t have any familial affinity to any database, but I’m not sure what the benefits to Postgres are relative to MySQL.
Back when I selected which database to get more fluent in one of the concerns I had about MySQL is that it was decribed as playing loose and fast with type casts, at least compared to Postgres.
That's thrown around by people who have been around a long time, but hasn't been true by default for a decade, since 5.7 was released.
Re: The Great Migration from MongoDB to PostgreSQL
#336I currently use MariaDB for my self-hosted application. Would I gain big advantages switching to PostgreSQL? My main reason for going with MySQL/MariaDB is the availability and ease of installation on most hosting providers.
No. In almost no circumstances will it be worthwhile to switch either direction. While people on HN love to nit-pick on the margins, the core functionality for both is 95% overlapped.
Re: The Great Migration from MongoDB to PostgreSQL
#337Earlier quoted context omitted.
Stability, reliability, consistency. If you do anything with Unicode you're also much better in PostgreSQL. Faster indexes, smaller base install ( ), and much more complete SQL language support. ( ) note: when PHP was taking off, MySQL had a smaller install base. This has long since changed - PostgreSQL hasn't grown much over the years, and MySQL has, at least since the last time I worked on both circa 2015-ish.
Friendly nitpick, because I had a double-take when reading the second paragraph: Be careful to differentiate between "install base" and "base install". In both cases, you are referring to "installed size of the database in its base configuration". But "install base" commonly means "number of installations". So I was very confused when the second paragraph was implying (using the standard meaning for "install base") t…
Fair. I was referring to the space a minimal installation takes.
Re: The Great Migration from MongoDB to PostgreSQL
#338Earlier quoted context omitted.
They grew 30% if you look at revenue, but that's not how people determine whether a business is healthy. EBITDA is a better metric, and that number was getting dramatically worse every year until 2023. But even in 2023, EBITDA was -$202M. I don't see it ever approaching $0. So it's still a shit business on top of a shit product that no one ever really needed.
I think anyone who administers mongodb would agree it has a list of very dangerous behaviors for novices. Try to upgrade a running instance node between some versions, and one may thrash object keys or worse. Best to dump and re-load your data every major upgrade to recover all set properties... and there still may be slight differences in the query language later. Wait, your data sets are 1.5TiB per node.... that is…
what is mongo's new licensing model?
Re: The Great Migration from MongoDB to PostgreSQL
#339Earlier quoted context omitted.
People who use EBITDA are either trying to con you or they're conning themselves.
Probably not used in a conning context when it’s 200-300 million in the red.
Hedge fund investor here chiming in for all of you financial wizards. Hint: don't look at EBITDA. Look at (Atlas) revenue, billings, (current) remaining performance obligations, and operating cash flow. On cash flow, some people decide they want to subtract stock comp (i.e. don't add it back in the GAAP Net Income > OCF reconcilation), but that's a whole other philosophical debate that the investing community has not settled on.
Can someone tell me what their licensing changes are?