As small piece of feedback, I think it would be really good if the tools list would include license information, and make it easy to filter for open source tools/licenses. IMHO source-available extensions break part of what is attractive to the Postgres ecosystem, which is that you can move from one provider to another without vendor lock-in.
Do you need separate systems when you already have Postgres?
61–70 of 90 posts
Re: Do you need separate systems when you already have Postgres?
#62I love Postgres, and I agree with the general sentiment. But I read the (growing) genre of "use Postgres for everything" articles and they imply a difficulty in running other software that I just don't see. I'm thinking of Redis in particular. If you're using it as incredibly fast but not critical storage, it's trivial to set up and it ~never crashes or requires maintenance. It creates no headaches, and in exchange g…
The problem only arises when you have to worry about persistent state. As soon as you have to worry about that, you have to think about backups, replicas, disaster recovery drills and so on. It is much easier to solve for that can of worms for one system than three.
Re: Do you need separate systems when you already have Postgres?
#63I love Postgres, and I agree with the general sentiment. But I read the (growing) genre of "use Postgres for everything" articles and they imply a difficulty in running other software that I just don't see. I'm thinking of Redis in particular. If you're using it as incredibly fast but not critical storage, it's trivial to set up and it ~never crashes or requires maintenance. It creates no headaches, and in exchange g…
Only problem for me vs using your primary DB is that Redis has no redundancy unless you run it in cluster mode. For us that means when the kubernetes node restarts, availability degrades. Could of course enable clustering, but at that point it isn’t dead simple anymore. And using the DB is.
Re: Do you need separate systems when you already have Postgres?
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
Oh no, redis is super simple to set up and use. It's just that setting it up is not as simple as not setting it up.
For smaller projects and locally, I'm running background services via a compose file... it's a few lines of configuration, and just works. Redis is crazy low hanging fruit.. even job queues that run over Redis make a bit more sense than with Postgres more often than not. I'm far more hesitant to throw a more formal MQ in the mix though... mostly from experience in that a lot of mid level ("senior") developers don't r…
Of course spinning up a hello world of anything is easy. Now introduce monitoring, change controls, version upgrades, multiple environments and regions
It's not that it's necessarily complex. But if you don't need it, don't use it. The business could use your time elsewhere
Re: Do you need separate systems when you already have Postgres?
#65I'll do you one better: do you really need Postgres and all these extensions when you already have a filesystem? > only after pushing Postgres to its limits, documenting why it was insufficient, and accepting the operational cost of the alternative I love Postgres as a DB but, really, this is ridiculous. No doubt these extensions can do the job well-enough but you might as well invest in learning the right tool for t…
In my experience the real answer is almost always "just don't do that other stuff". Most of the complexity Postgress is claiming to fix here doesn't need to exist in the first place.
Re: Do you need separate systems when you already have Postgres?
#66[flagged]
Re: Do you need separate systems when you already have Postgres?
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
For smaller projects and locally, I'm running background services via a compose file... it's a few lines of configuration, and just works. Redis is crazy low hanging fruit.. even job queues that run over Redis make a bit more sense than with Postgres more often than not. I'm far more hesitant to throw a more formal MQ in the mix though... mostly from experience in that a lot of mid level ("senior") developers don't r…
Of course spinning up a hello world of anything is easy. Now introduce monitoring, change controls, version upgrades, multiple environments and regions It's not that it's necessarily complex. But if you don't need it, don't use it. The business could use your time elsewhere
For a redis cache? I think you're way over-valuing the effort it takes to keep a redis instance running.
For a persistent store.. sure... but that's true for PostgreSQL as well, which has some pretty painful major version migrations by comparison to other options.
Re: Do you need separate systems when you already have Postgres?
#68I'll do you one better: do you really need Postgres and all these extensions when you already have a filesystem? > only after pushing Postgres to its limits, documenting why it was insufficient, and accepting the operational cost of the alternative I love Postgres as a DB but, really, this is ridiculous. No doubt these extensions can do the job well-enough but you might as well invest in learning the right tool for t…
Filesystem is best when there is a single writer and many readers.
If you have bunch of files and don't have any structure, yes filesystem is great but the moment when you need consistency & performance (which you need sooner rather than later) use databases.
Investing early doesn't hurt when you build a product that you know will have many writers.
Re: Do you need separate systems when you already have Postgres?
#69I love Postgres, and I agree with the general sentiment. But I read the (growing) genre of "use Postgres for everything" articles and they imply a difficulty in running other software that I just don't see. I'm thinking of Redis in particular. If you're using it as incredibly fast but not critical storage, it's trivial to set up and it ~never crashes or requires maintenance. It creates no headaches, and in exchange g…
Yeah I've found this quite odd. Even the LLMs want to pressure you to not use Redis and go all in on Postgres. Postgres is great, and I usually use it. But Redis is so trivial to add to your stack and it does what it does really well. Why not use the right tool for the job?
Presumably this is because LLMs just echo all the pro-Postgres Medium articles they've been trained on. They don't have any actual experience.
Re: Do you need separate systems when you already have Postgres?
#70Articles like these have been insanely effective in biasing LLMs (especially OpenAI) toward Postgres. There areas where Postgres beats MySQL, and vice versa - but ChatGPT/Codex overwhelmingly recommend "default to Postgres."
I agree, the inevitable feedback loops will be painful to watch play out. AI written blog -> AI training set -> repeat.