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PostgreSQL for Everything

raphaelbauer.com

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Re: PostgreSQL for Everything

#61

Post by dewey »

devin wrote: post #30

This kind of post (Postgres! It's all you need!) is getting pretty tiresome. Postgres does not even come close to a full replacement for Elastic, and that's just the first bullet. Looking down the list it is pretty easy to go: Yes, postgres can be used instead of that for extremely basic use cases, but it all goes out the window you actually need any of the power of these other tools.

The point is in general for people to just consider it, often people start out on their side projects or internal company projects and commission Elastic, Redis, Postgres, Kafka before even getting started. In reality they could fit it all into Postgres for a very long time.

Nobody is saying that a huge ecommerce store with complicated filtered search logic should throw away their Elasticsearch cluster and switch to Postgres.

Re: PostgreSQL for Everything

#64

Post by datadrivenangel »

erlich wrote: post #26

It's more "what one tool can do everything", not that its ideal. Like why people use Microsoft Teams even though its terrible. The relational model and sql force us to simplify our data models too much by eliminating relationships or just not dealing with them. Think about a nested json blob from some web service api and storing it in SQL in normalized tables. No one is going to do that. Everything just becomes a den…

people do that with JSON way too often...

Re: PostgreSQL for Everything

#65

Post by efxhoy »

Ive built data warehouses and job queues on postgres. The DW got replaced with bigquery when we started doing more tracking. We still run postgres as an app-facing cache of the aggregated data from bigquery though.

The job queue runs on the cache db, scheduling jobs to move data from bigquery into postgres. It’s pretty neat.

Now we’ve run into near-real-time requirements so clickhouse is getting thrown into the mix.

It’s pretty funny the lengths we go to to implement user facing analytics that’s basically just “you are visitor number X” from 1995.

Re: PostgreSQL for Everything

#67

Post by zulux »

replwoacause wrote: post #7

I use SQLite for everything, and I'm perfectly happy with it. I'm aware of the concurrent writer issues, but at my scale it doesn't even matter.

Perfectly reasonable:

I'm a huge PG fan, so I start everything with it, but SQLite is sane, and it generally has a happy upgrade path to PG If you need it.

Re: PostgreSQL for Everything

#68

Post by devin »

dewey wrote: post #61
devin wrote: post #30

This kind of post (Postgres! It's all you need!) is getting pretty tiresome. Postgres does not even come close to a full replacement for Elastic, and that's just the first bullet. Looking down the list it is pretty easy to go: Yes, postgres can be used instead of that for extremely basic use cases, but it all goes out the window you actually need any of the power of these other tools.

The point is in general for people to just consider it, often people start out on their side projects or internal company projects and commission Elastic, Redis, Postgres, Kafka before even getting started. In reality they could fit it all into Postgres for a very long time. Nobody is saying that a huge ecommerce store with complicated filtered search logic should throw away their Elasticsearch cluster and switch to…

If you actually start looking into these things, you often start looking at custom pg extensions, which means you just made the decision to "simplify" your stack by maintaining your own postgres cluster with custom extensions. This is just papering over the fact that you're increasing the complexity and saying "well it's still just postgres!" as you do it.

Re: PostgreSQL for Everything

#69

Post by otherme123 »

devin wrote: post #30

This kind of post (Postgres! It's all you need!) is getting pretty tiresome. Postgres does not even come close to a full replacement for Elastic, and that's just the first bullet. Looking down the list it is pretty easy to go: Yes, postgres can be used instead of that for extremely basic use cases, but it all goes out the window you actually need any of the power of these other tools.

I have a lot of troubles with a small private instance of Rocket chat, all due to MongoDb stuff, versions, migrations and backups. I bet almost all private instances of Rocket chat would be perfectly served with Postgres.

Posts like this can be tiresome, yet the general consensus among developers seems to be "yeah, Postgre/SQLite is ok for 99% of the cases, but MY case is going to be in the 1%, because I am going to be the next Facebook".

Re: PostgreSQL for Everything

#70

Post by tux3 »

atherton94027 wrote: post #35
williamdclt wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've not interacted with mysql a whole lot, but when i did I was regularly surprised that it didn't have stuff I was missing from Postgres. Off the top of my mind: - Query planner is much worse (just yesterday I had to USE INDEX to sped up a query by 300x, I'm near-certain postgres would just have gotten it right) - Indexes are much more limited: no GIST, no GIN - No transactional lock (`pg_advisory_xact_lock` in pos…

At least you have access to USE INDEX on MySQL. On Postgres it's not rare to have a query suddenly perform awful in production because some switch flipped in the planner and now it's picking some random index

Good news is that they just added a plan stability feature in pg19. It's actually full planner hints, so you can edit the plan to whatever you want if you have no fear, but the main motivation is exactly index stability.
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