Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Do you need separate systems when you already have Postgres?

postgresisenough.dev

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 90 posts

Re: Do you need separate systems when you already have Postgres?

#21

Post by PaulHoule »

sarchertech wrote: post #11
PaulHoule wrote: post #2

... and unlike all the new databases, Postgres has a decent license. Everybody else is so afraid of being co-opted by AWS that they won't let you run them the way the way you want.

Is there something specific you wanted to do that was prohibited by a license. I thought most of the licenses you’re talking about just prohibited you from reselling the database as a service.

A client introduced me to Arangodb which I felt was a "secret weapon" that I used for a lot of side projects. Then this came out

https://arango.ai/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/ADB-Community-L...

and it is dead to me. I want my head! I can accept GPL, Apache, MIT or some legit open source license. For my projects I see two possible paths which I want to have open: (1) building a commercial service on top of a database (like my RSS reader) where you can't necessarily draw a clear line between what is allowed and what is not allowed, for instance I have an adaptation layer that makes postgres look like the part of arangodb that I actually use (I do manually rewrite AQL queries into a DSL that extends AlchemyAPI) and if I did something similar over arango is this reselling? (2) an open source project where I want to tell people "go forth and use this code" and not have to hire a lawyer to know what they can and can't do.

Once a vendor has shown they have this attitude, I expect them to change their license for the worse in the future -- I just don't want to invest my time and energy in their platform.

Re: Do you need separate systems when you already have Postgres?

#22

Post by stavros »

dpc10 wrote: post #13

I love Postgres, and I agree with the general sentiment. But I read the (growing) genre of "use Postgres for everything" articles and they imply a difficulty in running other software that I just don't see. I'm thinking of Redis in particular. If you're using it as incredibly fast but not critical storage, it's trivial to set up and it ~never crashes or requires maintenance. It creates no headaches, and in exchange g…

Oh no, redis is super simple to set up and use. It's just that setting it up is not as simple as not setting it up.

Re: Do you need separate systems when you already have Postgres?

#23

Post by ubercore »

I love postgres, but the complexity of using it for everything starts to get pretty high, compared to more tailor-suited tools. We should probably use it for _more_, in general, but the cost of "everything in postgres" is generally higher than I see acknowledged in articles like these.

Re: Do you need separate systems when you already have Postgres?

#25

Post by ubercore »

sarchertech wrote: post #11
PaulHoule wrote: post #2

... and unlike all the new databases, Postgres has a decent license. Everybody else is so afraid of being co-opted by AWS that they won't let you run them the way the way you want.

Is there something specific you wanted to do that was prohibited by a license. I thought most of the licenses you’re talking about just prohibited you from reselling the database as a service.

It's also postgres, but timescaledb's licensing (and therefore its lack of good support in azure managed postgres) is a bummer.

Re: Do you need separate systems when you already have Postgres?

#26

Post by nhumrich »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #6

Are the various plugins easier to set up, configure, troubleshoot, etc. than the other software options? If I'm paged awake at 2am, will I have an easier time figuring out pgmq than I will RabbitMQ?

For these specifically? Way easier than rabbitMQ. I love rabbitmq. It's an amazing technology, and if you need a high throughout message bus, it's still a better goto. But.. it does require quite a lot of expertise and know how to operate. Paged at 2am, you will likely get very frustrated. Pgmq though, is "just a bunch of tables". It's going to be a lot easier to figure out what's going on. You already understand transactional DBs.

Unless of course, you already know how to operate rabbitmq.

Re: Do you need separate systems when you already have Postgres?

#27

Post by dinkleberg »

dpc10 wrote: post #13

I love Postgres, and I agree with the general sentiment. But I read the (growing) genre of "use Postgres for everything" articles and they imply a difficulty in running other software that I just don't see. I'm thinking of Redis in particular. If you're using it as incredibly fast but not critical storage, it's trivial to set up and it ~never crashes or requires maintenance. It creates no headaches, and in exchange g…

Yeah I've found this quite odd. Even the LLMs want to pressure you to not use Redis and go all in on Postgres. Postgres is great, and I usually use it. But Redis is so trivial to add to your stack and it does what it does really well. Why not use the right tool for the job?

Re: Do you need separate systems when you already have Postgres?

#28

Post by wuliwong »

stavros wrote: post #22
dpc10 wrote: post #13

I love Postgres, and I agree with the general sentiment. But I read the (growing) genre of "use Postgres for everything" articles and they imply a difficulty in running other software that I just don't see. I'm thinking of Redis in particular. If you're using it as incredibly fast but not critical storage, it's trivial to set up and it ~never crashes or requires maintenance. It creates no headaches, and in exchange g…

Oh no, redis is super simple to set up and use. It's just that setting it up is not as simple as not setting it up.

OK, but it is relatively easy to setup. Obviously, nobody thinks it is _literally_ effortless.

Re: Do you need separate systems when you already have Postgres?

#29

Post by throwaway7356 »

sarchertech wrote: post #11
PaulHoule wrote: post #2

... and unlike all the new databases, Postgres has a decent license. Everybody else is so afraid of being co-opted by AWS that they won't let you run them the way the way you want.

Is there something specific you wanted to do that was prohibited by a license. I thought most of the licenses you’re talking about just prohibited you from reselling the database as a service.

Yes, that condition makes it no longer open source software.

It also has the effect of making software adopting such licenses getting removed from open source distributions.

Re: Do you need separate systems when you already have Postgres?

#30

Post by Kinrany »

valentynkit wrote: post #24

The thing that usually pushes you off Postgres is rarely raw throughput, it's two workloads that want opposite tuning on the same box.

The solution might be to move to separate Postgres boxes everything that needs performance tuning at all.

I'm not in the "use Postgres for everything" camp, but only because I think it's too complex to be used like that. It should be replaced with a bunch of simple primitives in this role. No SQL and query planning magic please.

Post reply on HN