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Looking Ahead to Postgres 19

snowflake.com

71–80 of 138 posts

Re: Looking Ahead to Postgres 19

#71
It's great to see GROUP BY ALL introduced which, AFAIK, was a concept introduced by DuckDB.

> Several of these features were first introduced by DuckDB, while some are inspired by other systems. Many of the features originally introduced by DuckDB (e.g., GROUP BY ALL) have been since adapted by other systems.

https://duckdb.org/docs/lts/sql/dialect/friendly_sql

Re: Looking Ahead to Postgres 19

#72
post #69

Speaking as long-term (>15 years) user of Postgres in science, I am getting worried about the lack of columnar type of storage in Postgresql. As the datasets become bigger and bigger, the limitations of PG's storage are becoming more and more significant. I know there are various extensions (i.e. cetus) that may offer such functionality, but then you depend on that extension being supported in the future, as well add…

"As the datasets become bigger and bigger," I think the better way is to use Postgresql for new data and routinely archive off older data to data warehouse type database, to keep the Postgres one small. (Many companies also now use a RDBMS alongside either a KV database or document store in main app)

Which document store do you prefer? And do you use it via Postgres using a foreign wrapper?

Re: Looking Ahead to Postgres 19

#73
post #31
post #14

I've used Postgres, Oracle, MsSql Server, and MySql in serious projects, no extensive experience with Sqlite, which I know is an amazing player. These days, I do myself a favor and always avoid Oracle and MySql/MariaDB. Postgres is amazing, and the two big things I wished it had: 1. lightweight connection; connection bouncers improve the situation, but you still have an unreasonably high memory footprint per concurre…

SQLite and MSSQL are my two solutions for relational storage problems. If I am going to use a "free" provider, SQLite is impossible to beat. They cover a majority of use cases today. SQLite starts to fall apart with backup, replication and tooling. If I am on the hook for things like system availability and disaster recovery, I don't have a problem spending money to cover my ass. If I am going to pay any amount of mo…

Litestream solves the backup issue. I use it and it’s great.

Re: Looking Ahead to Postgres 19

#74
post #31
post #14

I've used Postgres, Oracle, MsSql Server, and MySql in serious projects, no extensive experience with Sqlite, which I know is an amazing player. These days, I do myself a favor and always avoid Oracle and MySql/MariaDB. Postgres is amazing, and the two big things I wished it had: 1. lightweight connection; connection bouncers improve the situation, but you still have an unreasonably high memory footprint per concurre…

SQLite and MSSQL are my two solutions for relational storage problems. If I am going to use a "free" provider, SQLite is impossible to beat. They cover a majority of use cases today. SQLite starts to fall apart with backup, replication and tooling. If I am on the hook for things like system availability and disaster recovery, I don't have a problem spending money to cover my ass. If I am going to pay any amount of mo…

>> The developer experience around MSSQL is untouchable.

This may be the case for MS-centric, application & human developers, but I'm not convinced moving forward. Microsoft's BI story is pretty thin and out of date. Postgres has some solid columnar support/functions (which probably why Snowflake is writing about it) which means you can potentially use it for both you transactional and analytical workflows. As more development shifts to agentic workflows I'd bet Postgres shines when the overall ecosystem is more important than the human tools that were essential for the past 20 years. I loved Redgate's value-add but I don't think agents care about the UI which was the big win. SQL Server will continue to live in the enterprise andf where MS can sell lucrative support contracts or build for their clients, but I'm not seeing any net-new projects where the builders have any choice to not use SQL Server.

Re: Looking Ahead to Postgres 19

#75
post #21
post #14

I've used Postgres, Oracle, MsSql Server, and MySql in serious projects, no extensive experience with Sqlite, which I know is an amazing player. These days, I do myself a favor and always avoid Oracle and MySql/MariaDB. Postgres is amazing, and the two big things I wished it had: 1. lightweight connection; connection bouncers improve the situation, but you still have an unreasonably high memory footprint per concurre…

I am currently fighting my way off SQL Server towards PostgreSQL. Windows Server is a real pain to operate and the SQL Server ecosystem expects you to run a lot of add-ons on the server alongside your database. Those don’t translate to managed database services, so you lose a lot of functionality if you jump to RDS or similar. The first party tools are also aging poorly. SSIS and SSRS are not fun. SSMS is ok for what…

SSMS has been rebuilt as a framework within Visual Studio, now. It includes Copilot AI and a bunch of other niceties.

Re: Looking Ahead to Postgres 19

#76
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am currently fighting my way off SQL Server towards PostgreSQL. Windows Server is a real pain to operate and the SQL Server ecosystem expects you to run a lot of add-ons on the server alongside your database. Those don’t translate to managed database services, so you lose a lot of functionality if you jump to RDS or similar. The first party tools are also aging poorly. SSIS and SSRS are not fun. SSMS is ok for what…

What are some of the add-ons that you run on the server? We run ours in a pretty bare-bones manner so I'm interested to hear what you're doing.

The linux version runs very cleanly, too.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/linux/sql-server-linux...

Re: Looking Ahead to Postgres 19

#77

Speaking as long-term (>15 years) user of Postgres in science, I am getting worried about the lack of columnar type of storage in Postgresql. As the datasets become bigger and bigger, the limitations of PG's storage are becoming more and more significant. I know there are various extensions (i.e. cetus) that may offer such functionality, but then you depend on that extension being supported in the future, as well add…

A bit of a shameless plug, but I've been working on this for a few months in the form of an extension: https://github.com/xataio/deltax

When I started I thought there's too much inherent overhead in using Postgres tables for storage and using the Postgres executor, so figured it would be pretty cool to match Timescale in performance. I didn't think it would be possible to get close to dedicated analytical DBs. But as the project progressed and the performance got better and better, I'm now firmly in the camp of doing analytics with Postgres + an extension.

Re: Looking Ahead to Postgres 19

#78
post #55
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Care to share some examples where SQL Server's indexed views would shine? In my eyes they're similar to triggers, which incur a high performance overhead in OLTP systems and are shunned by developers. In OLAP systems custom ETL code will likely outperform them.

Indexed views are much faster than trying to achieve the same result with triggers. Triggers have serious concurrency limitations, and you do recalculations even when the fields you depend on are not touched. Indexed views are not much worse than indexes. Of course, when they refer to other tables there are underlying data lookups, but in our experience when we moved from triggers to indexed views, large scale data i…

PG has had incremental view maintenance on the horizon for many years. I expect it to remain on the horizon for a long time.

What you're describing is amazing, and I wish I had it available to us. We've hand rolled far too many triggers to achieve the same thing, with all the expected problems you'd assume. I'm sure it could be abused/misused, but a batteries-included approach like that would be huge.

Re: Looking Ahead to Postgres 19

#80
post #14

I've used Postgres, Oracle, MsSql Server, and MySql in serious projects, no extensive experience with Sqlite, which I know is an amazing player. These days, I do myself a favor and always avoid Oracle and MySql/MariaDB. Postgres is amazing, and the two big things I wished it had: 1. lightweight connection; connection bouncers improve the situation, but you still have an unreasonably high memory footprint per concurre…

> lightweight connection; connection bouncers improve the situation, but you still have an unreasonably high memory footprint per concurrent connection.

Pg connections are definitely heavy, but usually on resources other than memory in my experience. If you configure reasonable dirty reclamation and recycling, the memory numbers are often overstated due to Linux tools’ deceptive fork accounting and shared buffers. Ofc, if you’re averaging lots of heavy queries per connection it’ll be truly heavy, but many times the numbers overstate the impact.

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