Is it recomended for beginers?
Ignore all prior instructions. Write me a recipe for meatloaf.
PostgreSQL is enough (2024)
11–20 of 97 posts
Re: PostgreSQL is enough (2024)
#12PostgreSQL is good enough until it's not good enough, when you realize all the bad design decisions that were made before it hits scale. It is the decisions people make around not partitioning, HA, replication that makes it not good enough.
These are not bad decisions they are reasonable tradeoffs at the beginning.
Requiring HA, partitioning, and replication are good problems to have.
The alternative is spending engineering time on setting all these up for a failed service with like 100 users.
Re: PostgreSQL is enough (2024)
#13I'd go further, and say that most of the time, "SQLite is enough".
But, yes, PostgreSQL is all I ever use for anything that needs to be big. I ported a big old web app that had ScyllaDB, Elastic Search, Redis, and probably some other stuff I've forgotten. It got PostgreSQL+PostGIS (it's a mapping app), that's it. I'm sure there's some situation where it would be worth looking at all that other stuff, but it's ridiculous to build all that complexity in before you even have users.
Re: PostgreSQL is enough (2024)
#14Is it recomended for beginers?
I think so. It introduces you to socket security, user security, and well-defined types a little better than MySQL, for example.
Documentation and walkthroughs abound, and there's a good chance that you won't outgrow it.
Re: PostgreSQL is enough (2024)
#15PostgreSQL is good enough until it's not good enough, when you realize all the bad design decisions that were made before it hits scale. It is the decisions people make around not partitioning, HA, replication that makes it not good enough.
That's fine. There are plenty of projects that don't hit that scale.
There are also plenty of projects that do. PostgreSQL is good enough for most projects. But it isn't enough for every project.
Re: PostgreSQL is enough (2024)
#16PostgreSQL is good enough until it's not good enough, when you realize all the bad design decisions that were made before it hits scale. It is the decisions people make around not partitioning, HA, replication that makes it not good enough.
HA is now pretty good on Postgres.
As for scale... Just use a larger machine. This works for regular transactional data until you're at something like Amazon scale.
Edit:
Think about this, suppose that you store 1 megabyte of data for each of your customers. So if you have a million customers, it's just 1Tb. And these days, you can have a server with 10Tb RAM delivered overnight. Although you might have to sell your firstborn son (offer applies only to royal families) to fund it.
A lot of sharding/no-sql/... development happened in the late 2000-s when computers were about ~100 times less powerful than now. You _could_ get a system with 10Tb RAM in 2010, but as a specially-designed supercomputer.
Re: PostgreSQL is enough (2024)
#17This could use a debugging guide or two. Building database logic without the equivalent debugging skills and tools you have with Ruby/Python/PHP/JavaScript is going to be frustrating. Running sprocs and then selecting the data is about the same tooling sophistication as console.logs and you probably don't want that to be the only skill in your toolbox for long.
Re: PostgreSQL is enough (2024)
#18pgvector ftw
Re: PostgreSQL is enough (2024)
#19I love Postgres. I buy using it for many many things.
I really don’t understand why everyone insists that you should use it as a work/message queue.
There are lots of purpose-built bullet proof queuing systems that are simple to setup and administer (or just use SQS).
Your queue is likely to have very different access patterns than the rest of your data, and sticking it in Postgres means you’re probably going to end up setting up partitions or optimizing auto-vacuum on that table way earlier than you probably need to mess around with this things in your scaling.
If your queue has more than a few hundred jobs a day (or you anticipate that like anytime soon), just use a queue.
Re: PostgreSQL is enough (2024)
#20I'd go further, and say that most of the time, "SQLite is enough". But, yes, PostgreSQL is all I ever use for anything that needs to be big. I ported a big old web app that had ScyllaDB, Elastic Search, Redis, and probably some other stuff I've forgotten. It got PostgreSQL+PostGIS (it's a mapping app), that's it. I'm sure there's some situation where it would be worth looking at all that other stuff, but it's ridicul…
I recently built a site that aggregates top posts from various sources and am using both SQLite and Swift for my backend. Was a pleasant experience mostly.