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PostgreSQL for Everything

raphaelbauer.com

121–130 of 286 posts

Re: PostgreSQL for Everything

#121
post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As SRE dealing with this at current company, a benefit of using well known software like Kafka is a lot of problems you will run into have solutions/guidance already available vs you having to explore solutions which a lot of time end with “Kafka could easily do this. “

100% except when Kafka goes wrong, who maintains it?

There are two sizes of companies: those that can afford '1+ dedicated ____-person' and those that can't. Which should filter through to technology choices more than it does.

Re: PostgreSQL for Everything

#122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The power of the other tools mostly shines in large scales. For most applications, though, performance of postgres more than suffices. I tried to use rabbitmq for a small app, installed it, configured it and then it didn't work. Spent a day jumping through hoops getting it right. Dumped it and used postgres, in half an hour. Worked like a charm.

Sure, best not to overcomplicate early if you don't need it. PG is great and I work with it daily, but it's also not a problem to think about scale early and at least have a notional plan for what to and how to know when scale is becoming an issue in your system as you're designing it. Even PG is overkill and sqlite is more than enough for some of my projects. There are a lot of specialized tools available, but you d…

This is the way. Notionally building a space/path to scale into architecture early, but delaying implementation of that scaling component until actually needed.

Then a system gets most of the benefits of not accidentally making it torturous to rearchitect for scale, without paying the headcount / complexity cost until it's needed.

Re: PostgreSQL for Everything

#123
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.

You're right that vanilla Postgres doesn't come close to replacing Elastic. There are efforts to resolve this, though, like ParadeDB: https://github.com/paradedb/paradedb (disclaimer: I work for ParadeDB)

Re: PostgreSQL for Everything

#124
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.

You're right that vanilla Postgres doesn't come close to replacing Elastic. There are efforts to resolve this, though, like ParadeDB: https://github.com/paradedb/paradedb (disclaimer: I work for ParadeDB)

"Disclaimer" means "don't take this seriously because I'm not an expert". You mean "disclosure".

Re: PostgreSQL for Everything

#126
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.

> Postgres does not even come close to a full replacement for Elastic

Size matters!

For most of the application out there elastic (or kafka or any other specialized tool) is just too much(and too costly). They can do fine with postgres or mysql. Actually, I'd argue that in a lot of cases even postgres is too much, probably sqlite is enough.

Re: PostgreSQL for Everything

#129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it would be helpful if some of these posts included scale. There are almost always two groups talking past each other - I run my B2B application, Postgres only, and it is perfect for my 50k MAU. No complaints, sleeping soundly with the low complexity and a two man team. - I work at FAANG, where we have 1 billion DAU, and this is a joke. Would fall over immediately. The dedicated ops teams for Kubernetes, Elas…

i think 1 billion DAU is the exception here, so I would not expect everyone to constantly caveat personally.

Agreed, but many of the criticisms I am reading here are assuming high scaling requirements and invalidating the approach entirely. When there are many business domains that will comfortably fit within a modestly specced database instance.

Re: PostgreSQL for Everything

#130
to risk sounding like a madman - if you're a solo individual- serving b2b small businesses.

then Sqlite works as well too. can run the whole thing on Cloudflare.

running Postgres isn't difficult. but dealing with a VPS for low traffic is a headache that's not necessary.

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