It's 2026, Just Use Postgres • Hacker News Board

Re: It's 2026, Just Use Postgres

#161

Post by mekoka » Fri, Feb 06, 2026, 12:29 AM UTC

zzzeek wrote: post #24

Lots of familiar things here except for this UNLOGGED table as a cache thing. That's totally new to me. Has someone benched this approach against memcached and redis ? I'm extremely skeptical PGs query / protocol overheads are going to be competitive with memcached, but I'm making this up and have nothing to back it up.

They don't compare exactly. Author is mistaken in thinking that UNLOGGED means "in memory". It means "no WAL", so there's considerable speed up there, but traded in with also more volatility. To be a viable alternative to Redis or Memcached though, the savings you get from the latter two must really be superfluous to your use case. Which could be true for many (most?).

Re: It's 2026, Just Use Postgres

#162

Post by olivia-banks » Fri, Feb 06, 2026, 12:30 AM UTC

nickmonad wrote: post #129

TZubiri wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it's not web scale, mongoDB is web scale

You turn it on, and it scales right up.

Who cares what we store so long as we do it quickly?

Re: It's 2026, Just Use Postgres

#163

Post by olivia-banks » Fri, Feb 06, 2026, 12:33 AM UTC

rtpg wrote: post #103

olivia-banks wrote: post #5

I do agree, I don’t know why more people don’t just use Postgres. If I’m doing data exploration with lots of data (e.g., GIS, nD vectors), I’ll just spin up a Postgres.app on my macOS laptop, install what little I need, and it just works and is plenty fast for my needs. It’s a really great choice for a lot of domains. That being said, while I think Postgres is “the right tool for the job” in many cases, sometimes you…

> in many cases, sometimes you just want (relative) simplicity, both in terms of complexity and deployment, and should use something like SQLite. So many times when trying to just go for simplicity with SQLite it takes me like one working day until I run up against enough annoyances to where resolving those is more work than setting up the "set up and forget" postgres instance. Granted, this is for personal stuff...…

Oh, yes, that's one of my points! I think Postgres is a great way to deal with tons of data, and it's really the only thing I use to do any sort of analysis or informatics (that and Parquet + Dask).

Re: It's 2026, Just Use Postgres

#164

Post by olivia-banks » Fri, Feb 06, 2026, 12:35 AM UTC

eek2121 wrote: post #152

olivia-banks wrote: post #5

I do agree, I don’t know why more people don’t just use Postgres. If I’m doing data exploration with lots of data (e.g., GIS, nD vectors), I’ll just spin up a Postgres.app on my macOS laptop, install what little I need, and it just works and is plenty fast for my needs. It’s a really great choice for a lot of domains. That being said, while I think Postgres is “the right tool for the job” in many cases, sometimes you…

Standardizing on one single tiny little project is always a bad idea. Why? Some examples (which are admittedly not related to postgres, because I don't know their structure): 1) A single person, doing a ton of heavy lifting, leaves, or worse, turns it over, or silently sells out to a nefarious person. 2) A severe security vulnerability is found. If everyone is using postgres, everyone is vulnerable. Bonus points if t…

I'm not sure I would call either PostgreSQL or SQLite "tiny."

Re: It's 2026, Just Use Postgres

#165

Post by JoshPurtell » Fri, Feb 06, 2026, 12:38 AM UTC

It's 2026, just use Planetscale Postgres

Re: It's 2026, Just Use Postgres

#166

Post by nubg » Fri, Feb 06, 2026, 12:39 AM UTC

I think it's disgenious by the author to publish this article heavily edited by AI and not disclose it.

Re: It's 2026, Just Use Postgres

#167

Post by intrasight » Fri, Feb 06, 2026, 12:41 AM UTC

candiddevmike wrote: post #144

olivia-banks wrote: post #5

I do agree, I don’t know why more people don’t just use Postgres. If I’m doing data exploration with lots of data (e.g., GIS, nD vectors), I’ll just spin up a Postgres.app on my macOS laptop, install what little I need, and it just works and is plenty fast for my needs. It’s a really great choice for a lot of domains. That being said, while I think Postgres is “the right tool for the job” in many cases, sometimes you…

I wish PostgreSQL had a native vector implementation instead of using extensions. They're kind of a pain in the ass to maintain, especially with migrations.

For me the showstopper missing feature is a standard and native implementation of temporal tables. Once you use those effectively in an application, it become something you can't do without.

Re: It's 2026, Just Use Postgres

#168

Post by wredcoll » Fri, Feb 06, 2026, 12:51 AM UTC

sfifs wrote: post #124

olivia-banks wrote: post #5

I do agree, I don’t know why more people don’t just use Postgres. If I’m doing data exploration with lots of data (e.g., GIS, nD vectors), I’ll just spin up a Postgres.app on my macOS laptop, install what little I need, and it just works and is plenty fast for my needs. It’s a really great choice for a lot of domains. That being said, while I think Postgres is “the right tool for the job” in many cases, sometimes you…

A bit off topic but the one thing I've never been able to figure out with Postgres easily & reliably is what magic incantations allow a user account full access to a specific database but not to others, particularly in cases of managed postgres offered by cloud providers. `GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES` never seems to work. Having to look up and spend time fixing permissions every time itself makes using Postgres for simple u…

I ran into this once... I think there's something about the grant not working on new objects or being one level too low? I tended to solve those problems by granting ownership of the db itself.

Re: It's 2026, Just Use Postgres

#169

Post by mulmen » Fri, Feb 06, 2026, 12:55 AM UTC

sfifs wrote: post #124

olivia-banks wrote: post #5

I do agree, I don’t know why more people don’t just use Postgres. If I’m doing data exploration with lots of data (e.g., GIS, nD vectors), I’ll just spin up a Postgres.app on my macOS laptop, install what little I need, and it just works and is plenty fast for my needs. It’s a really great choice for a lot of domains. That being said, while I think Postgres is “the right tool for the job” in many cases, sometimes you…

A bit off topic but the one thing I've never been able to figure out with Postgres easily & reliably is what magic incantations allow a user account full access to a specific database but not to others, particularly in cases of managed postgres offered by cloud providers. `GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES` never seems to work. Having to look up and spend time fixing permissions every time itself makes using Postgres for simple u…

One of the best features of Postgres is the documentation. I recommend starting there.

Re: It's 2026, Just Use Postgres

#170

Post by anonzzzies » Fri, Feb 06, 2026, 12:55 AM UTC

It's 20xx just use sqlite. Almost no-one needs all that power; they sure do think they do, but really don't. And will never. SQLite + Duck is all you need even with a million visitors; when you need failover and scaling you need more, but that is a tiny fraction of all companies.