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It's 2026, Just Use Postgres

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Re: It's 2026, Just Use Postgres

#121

Post by j45 »

oldestofsports wrote: post #23

Caching is mentioned in the article: What do you guys feel about using PostgreSQL for caching instead of Redis? Redis is many times faster, so much that it doesn't seem comparable to me. A lot of data you can get away with just caching in-mem on each node, but when you have many nodes there are valid cases where you really want that distributed cache.

Depends how much you have to cache and how much speed you really need from it.

I like Redis a lot, but for things in the start I'm not sure the juice is always worth the squeeze to get it setup and manage another item in teh stack.

Luckily, search is something that has been thought about and worked on for a while and there's lots of ways to slice it initially.

I'm probably a bit biased though from past experiences from seeing so many different search engines shimmed beside or into a database that there's often an easier way in the start than adding more to the stack.

Re: It's 2026, Just Use Postgres

#122

Post by j45 »

sgarland wrote: post #110
dimgl wrote: post #87

I've actually started moving away from Postgres to MySQL and SQLite. I don't want to have to deal with the vacuums/maintenance/footguns.

MySQL is definitely easier to use if you don’t want to ever have to think about DB maintenance; on the other hand, you’re giving up a TON of features that could make your queries enormously performant if your schema is designed around them - like BRIN indices, partial indices, way better partition management, etc. OTOH, if and only if you design your schema to exploit MySQL’s clustering index (like for 1:M, make the…

As someone who learned to think in MySQL, this is really true, at the time Postgres was a viable alternative too, only the tooling to get started reached me a little easier and quicker.

The major thing I advocate for is don't pick a NOSQL database to avoid relational dbs, only to try and do a bunch of relational work in NOSQL that would have been trivial in an RBDMS. Postgres can even power graph query results which is great.

Re: It's 2026, Just Use Postgres

#123

Post by TZubiri »

olivia-banks wrote: post #5

I do agree, I don’t know why more people don’t just use Postgres. If I’m doing data exploration with lots of data (e.g., GIS, nD vectors), I’ll just spin up a Postgres.app on my macOS laptop, install what little I need, and it just works and is plenty fast for my needs. It’s a really great choice for a lot of domains. That being said, while I think Postgres is “the right tool for the job” in many cases, sometimes you…

Because it's not web scale, mongoDB is web scale

Re: It's 2026, Just Use Postgres

#124

Post by sfifs »

olivia-banks wrote: post #5

I do agree, I don’t know why more people don’t just use Postgres. If I’m doing data exploration with lots of data (e.g., GIS, nD vectors), I’ll just spin up a Postgres.app on my macOS laptop, install what little I need, and it just works and is plenty fast for my needs. It’s a really great choice for a lot of domains. That being said, while I think Postgres is “the right tool for the job” in many cases, sometimes you…

A bit off topic but the one thing I've never been able to figure out with Postgres easily & reliably is what magic incantations allow a user account full access to a specific database but not to others, particularly in cases of managed postgres offered by cloud providers. `GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES` never seems to work.

Having to look up and spend time fixing permissions every time itself makes using Postgres for simple uses difficult for me but if you're using it ad hoc, any tips?

Re: It's 2026, Just Use Postgres

#126

Post by cpursley »

throwaway81523 wrote: post #62

Gad, they sure like to say "BM25" over and over again. That's a near worthless approach to result ranking. Doing any halfway ok job requires much more tuned and/or more powerful approaches.

It's common to do a hybrid of BM25 with other fuzzy search or pgvector.

Re: It's 2026, Just Use Postgres

#128

Post by jlundberg »

riku_iki wrote: post #83
ddtaylor wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am curious if you know anyone using Btrfs for this too. I like ZFS, but it Btrfs can do this it would be easier to use with some distros, etc. as it's supported in kernel.

I do it. The big problem for me from running DB on Btrfs is that when I delete large dirs or files (100GB+), it locks disk system, and Db basically stop responding on any queries. I am very surprised that FS which is considered prod grade having this issue..

Try XFS if you havn’t yet.

Very solid and no such issues.

Re: It's 2026, Just Use Postgres

#129

Post by nickmonad »

TZubiri wrote: post #123
olivia-banks wrote: post #5

I do agree, I don’t know why more people don’t just use Postgres. If I’m doing data exploration with lots of data (e.g., GIS, nD vectors), I’ll just spin up a Postgres.app on my macOS laptop, install what little I need, and it just works and is plenty fast for my needs. It’s a really great choice for a lot of domains. That being said, while I think Postgres is “the right tool for the job” in many cases, sometimes you…

Because it's not web scale, mongoDB is web scale

You turn it on, and it scales right up.

Re: It's 2026, Just Use Postgres

#130

Post by saisrirampur »

hermanzegerman wrote: post #119
saisrirampur wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree to disagree here. I see a world where developers need to think about (reasonable) scale from day one, or at least very early. We’ve been seeing this play out at ClickHouse - the need for purpose-built OLAP is reducing from years to months. Also integration with ClickHouse is few weeks of effort for potentially significantly faster performance for analytics.

[flagged]

That wasn’t my intention though to mention my workplace multiple times for the sake of PR. Try to avoid being that, atleast on hn. :)
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