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Postgres is eating the database world

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141–147 of 147 posts

Re: Postgres is eating the database world

#141
post #31

Postgres is still single-node-first, and while Citus exists I'm skeptical that it can ever become as easy to administer as a true HA-first datastore. For me the reason to use something like Cassandra or Kafka was never "big data" per se, it was having true master-master fault tolerance out of the box in a way that worked with everything.

> Postgres… Kafka… Cassandra These are all wildly different products that should not be considered for the same purposes.

If your premise is that Postgres is eating the datastore world, then you're talking about using it as a replacement for Kafka and Cassandra.

Frankly if you zoom out far enough they're all systems suitable for use as your primary online datastore that you build your application on (each with their own caveats of course). There are places where they compete.

Re: Postgres is eating the database world

#142
post #47

Someone who picked their tools with good tech judgement 25 years ago can be using the same today (eg PG, Python, Linux) without corporate control of them, it's pretty great.

Linux is absolutely corporate controlled, sadly. Just look at how decisions like systemd and wayland get made.

Re: Postgres is eating the database world

#143
post #31

Postgres is still single-node-first, and while Citus exists I'm skeptical that it can ever become as easy to administer as a true HA-first datastore. For me the reason to use something like Cassandra or Kafka was never "big data" per se, it was having true master-master fault tolerance out of the box in a way that worked with everything.

> Postgres… Kafka… Cassandra These are all wildly different products that should not be considered for the same purposes.

But that's the gist of the article here, right? That Postgres is taking over all db-like use cases. It doesn't claim that it can replace Kafka but https://www.amazingcto.com/postgres-for-everything/ certainly does. Of course it's not a full replacement, but it might be good enough.

Re: Postgres is eating the database world

#144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> PG is great to admin What do you use for it? Is there anything like phpmyadmin for postgres with similar simplicity?

Coming myself from MySQL to Postgres I found PgAdmin ( https://www.pgadmin.org/screenshots/#7 ) easy to use

Pgadmin has gotten lots of bad feedback. I'm using dBeaver or the IntelliJ sidebar to connect to the database.

Dbeaver is more useful. But you can do everything from the command line. You use sql to write database migrations anyway, no?

Re: Postgres is eating the database world

#145
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody does actually. Postgres not having deterministic query plans is a big pain and a good reason not to use it. The same query may use different query plans depending on the estimated number of affected rows, very frustrating.

It's been many years since I've had to use an Oracle db, but they definitely allowed SQL developers to forcibly specify a query-plan - called "query hints", wherein you could specify it to prefer using (or avoiding) certain indexes, certain join-strategies (hash, loop, etc) - this was done via comments immediately before the SQL query - see https://docs.oracle.com/cd/B13789_01/server.101/b10752/hints... Postgresql do…

The query hints thing is actually quite useful in an educational context.

There's DB internals/performance course which I'm a TA for and we lean heavily on being able to force Oracle's rule-based or cost-based optimisers --- because then we can get the students to analyse and compare the plans.

Re: Postgres is eating the database world

#146
post #38
post #19

Postgres is such a great tool. The feature I'd love to see added that has been kicking around the mailing list for ages now would be incremental view maintenance. Being able to keep moderately complex analysis workloads fresh in realtime would be such a boon.

https://github.com/sraoss/pg_ivm does what you need

pg_ivm has a ton of restrictions though (as do other PG incremental view refresh mechanisms, like timescale hypertables).

That's why I assume it's not in vanilla postgres: adding the future with so many caveats would not make for a great experience for the full breadth of postgres users.

Re: Postgres is eating the database world

#147
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this feature even possible? How can the database unravel a complex queries with derived data to minimal updates from its normalized parts? The easy way is to rebuild everything if any “from table” as been modified. The manual way is to create triggers that perform the minimal updates.

There are lots of projects who have managed to achieve this. Streaming frameworks like Kafka Streams and Flink have incrementally updating tables in memory. Materialize is built around the concept with a Postgres compatible API. ClickHouse materialized views act like insert triggers which update when the base table is updated.

I'm not familiar with ClickHouse materialized views, but the other tech you list (as I roughly understand them) seem more concerned with streaming SQL, which is a related but different end user experience from incrementally refreshed materialized views.
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