Postgres was designed as a row-based OLTP database, with over 30 years of effort dedicated to making it robust for that use case.I know there are many extensions attempting to make Postgres support other use cases, such as analytics, queues, and more. Keep in mind that these extensions are relatively recent and aim to retrofit new capabilities onto a database primarily designed for transactional workloads. It’s like adding an F1 car engine to a Toyota Camry — will that work?
Extensions also have many issues—they are not fully Postgres-compatible. In Citus, for example, we added support for the COPY command four years into the company, and chasing SQL coverage was a daily challenge for 10 years. Being unable to use the full capabilities of Postgres and having to work around numerous unsupported features defeats the purpose of being a Postgres extension.
On the other hand, you have purpose-built alternatives like ClickHouse and Snowflake for analytics, Redis for caching, and Kafka for queues. These technologies have benefited from decades of development, laser-focused on supporting specific use cases. As a result, they are robust and highly efficient for their intended purposes.
I often hear that these Postgres extensions are expanding the boundaries of what Postgres can do. While I partly agree, I also question the extent to which these boundaries are truly being expanded. In this era of AI, where data is growing exponentially, handling scale is critical for any technology. These boundaries will likely be broken very quickly.
Take queues as an example: you have a purpose-built technology like Kafka or a Postgres extension that supports queues. For an early-stage startup, adopting a less optimized Postgres-based solution may (not a guarantee) save a few weeks of initial CapEx costs compared to using an optimized solution like Kafka. However, 6 to 12 months later, you may find yourself back to square one when the Postgres-based queue fails to scale. At that point, migrating to a purpose-built technology becomes an arduous task—your system has grown, and now it may take months of effort and a larger team to make the switch.
Ultimately, this approach can cost more time and money than starting with a purpose-built solution from the beginning, which might have only required a few extra weeks of CapEx. I’ve seen this firsthand at Citus, where customers like Cloudflare and Heap eventually migrated to purpose-built databases like ClickHouse and SingleStore respectively. While these migrations happened a few years later, times have changed — data grows faster now, and the need for a purpose-built database arises much sooner. It’s also worth noting that Citus was an incredible piece of technology that required years of development before it could start making a real impact.
TL;DR: Please think carefully before choosing the right technology as you scale. Cramming everything into Postgres might not be the best approach for scaling your business.