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What it means to be a Postgres extension

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Re: What it means to be a Postgres extension

#11

Post by vog »

simooooo wrote: post #3

They were surprised that maintaining a postgres fork was a pain in the ass?

I also don't get it.

Ever for smaller changes, it is very well known that you better contribute back to the Free Software project - because having your patch included and being maintained there is a lot less trouble than maintaining your fork and updating your patches every few months.

One exception might be one-off changes, but we all know that nothing is more definitive than the temporary.

The only real exception is when your patch is superseded by another patch (or a better solution). Then, you maintian your private patch only until next version is finalized.

Re: What it means to be a Postgres extension

#12

Post by no1youknowz »

siscia wrote: post #4

Since we are talking about postgres, please let me go a little OT Is there any interests in a RDS as a Service? So basically setting up and running a completely fault aware postgres cluster in any infrastructure, either public or private?

Out of interest, could you support MySQL? Or more specifically MemSQL?

Re: What it means to be a Postgres extension

#13

Post by brightball »

siscia wrote: post #4

Since we are talking about postgres, please let me go a little OT Is there any interests in a RDS as a Service? So basically setting up and running a completely fault aware postgres cluster in any infrastructure, either public or private?

Yes, but the trick with it is pricing it so that I have a reason to use it instead of just using RDS.

If I could get something like that on Digital Ocean I’d be all over it.

Re: What it means to be a Postgres extension

#14

Post by siscia »

no1youknowz wrote: post #12
siscia wrote: post #4

Since we are talking about postgres, please let me go a little OT Is there any interests in a RDS as a Service? So basically setting up and running a completely fault aware postgres cluster in any infrastructure, either public or private?

Out of interest, could you support MySQL? Or more specifically MemSQL?

This is really just an idea to solve a pain point of mine that I guess is shared among us...

By the way I don't have any experience with MemSQL

Re: What it means to be a Postgres extension

#15

Post by siscia »

brightball wrote: post #13
siscia wrote: post #4

Since we are talking about postgres, please let me go a little OT Is there any interests in a RDS as a Service? So basically setting up and running a completely fault aware postgres cluster in any infrastructure, either public or private?

Yes, but the trick with it is pricing it so that I have a reason to use it instead of just using RDS. If I could get something like that on Digital Ocean I’d be all over it.

Well, Aiven seems to support DO: https://aiven.io/postgresql

Re: What it means to be a Postgres extension

#16

Post by siscia »

techdragon wrote: post #9
siscia wrote: post #4

Since we are talking about postgres, please let me go a little OT Is there any interests in a RDS as a Service? So basically setting up and running a completely fault aware postgres cluster in any infrastructure, either public or private?

Oh dear sweet lords in the many heavens yes. I have literally turned down devops transition and general system administration work before because they refused to use RDS or equivalent service like Compose.io due to internal corporate policy. Life is too short for me to ever babysit another database server through the painful process of a carefully orchestrated rolling capacity upgrade by way of deliberate use of repl…

Pretty much the same pain point that I experience.

Thanks for your feedback :)

Re: What it means to be a Postgres extension

#17

Post by stubish »

simooooo wrote: post #3

They were surprised that maintaining a postgres fork was a pain in the ass?

I think it was more that forks just get ignored. Customers want to run PostgreSQL, not something almost but not quite like PostgreSQL maintained by a company that may or may not employ PostgreSQL core contributors. And we certainly don't want to talk to your sales team about why it is a better fit for our use case.

The stuff Citus has been landing in PostgreSQL is fantastic.

Re: What it means to be a Postgres extension

#19

Post by stubish »

vog wrote: post #11
simooooo wrote: post #3

They were surprised that maintaining a postgres fork was a pain in the ass?

I also don't get it. Ever for smaller changes, it is very well known that you better contribute back to the Free Software project - because having your patch included and being maintained there is a lot less trouble than maintaining your fork and updating your patches every few months. One exception might be one-off changes, but we all know that nothing is more definitive than the temporary. The only real exception i…

It took a lot of work to not fork, and only recently became practical. Features like logical replication, DDL triggers, foreign data wrappers are all useful for this sort of thing and are all new. Companies like Citus and 2nd Quadrant first needed to get the infrastructure in place, so kudos to them and the PostgreSQL core team.

Re: What it means to be a Postgres extension

#20

Post by oliwarner »

This seems like a VERY shallow analysis of the benefits.

Forking an industrial-grade tool means the entire lifespan of the entire product becomes your responsibility to your client. Tracking the major upgrade changes might be a pain in the arse but they're nothing compared to tracking every security and data-loss fix that bubbles around the Postgres community.

It's not just developer time that's the cost here. They had to compile the whole Postgres+Citus database, for every platform they support, in a timely manner, test it and distribute packages. Think of all the CPU cycles and bandwidth they're saving by only having to compile as an extension against public headers.

Functioning as an extension means Postgres and its distributors (eg Ubuntu) are the people responsible for keeping Postgres alive and secure. Citus only have to support their thing.

Why aren't they talking about how much this move is saving them in day-to-day? There's no shame in being efficient.

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