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It's 2026, Just Use Postgres

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Re: It's 2026, Just Use Postgres

#221

Post by keyshapegeo99 »

Can I just say, I'm getting really sick of these LLM-generated posts clogging up this site?

GPTZero gives this a 95% chance of being entirely AI-generated. (5% human-AI mix, and 0% completely original.)

But I could tell you that just by using my eyes, the tells are so obvious. "The myth / The reality, etc."

If I wanted to know what ChatGPT had to say about something, I would ask ChatGPT. That's not what I come here for, and I think the same applies to most others.

Here's an idea for all you entrepreneur types: devise a privacy-preserving, local-running browser extension for scanning all content that a user encounters in their browser - and changing the browser extension icon to warn of an AI generated article or social media post or whatever. So that I do not have to waste a further second interacting with it. I would genuinely pay a hefty subscription fee for such a service at this point, provided it worked well.

Re: It's 2026, Just Use Postgres

#223

Post by bloaf »

LaGrange wrote: post #86
saisrirampur wrote: post #55

I’m a huge Postgres fan. That said, I don’t agree with the blanket advice of “just use Postgres.” That stance often comes from folks who haven’t been exposed enough to (newer) purpose-built technologies and the tremendous value they can create The argument, as in this blog, is that a single Postgres stack is simpler and reduces complexity. What’s often overlooked is the CAPEX and OPEX required to make Postgres work w…

> At Citus Data, we saw many customers with solid-sized teams of Postgres experts whose primary job was constant tuning, operating, and essentially babysitting the system to keep it performing at scale. Oh no, not a company hiring a team of specialist in a core technology you need! What next, paying them a good wage? C'mon, it's so much better to get a bunch of random, excuse me, "specialized" SaaS tools that will _s…

At my company I saw a team of devs pay for a special purpose "query optimized" database with "exabyte capability" to handle... their totally ordinary HR data.

I queried said database... it was slow.

I looked to see what indexes they had set up... there were none.

That team should have just used postgres and spent all the time and money they poured into this fancy database tech on finding someone who knew even a little bit about database design to help them.

Re: It's 2026, Just Use Postgres

#224

Post by direwolf20 »

saisrirampur wrote: post #130
hermanzegerman wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

That wasn’t my intention though to mention my workplace multiple times for the sake of PR. Try to avoid being that, atleast on hn. :)

Unless you have YC funding. Conflicts of interest go brrr! HN doesn't even try to hide it.

Re: It's 2026, Just Use Postgres

#225

Post by direwolf20 »

pclmulqdq wrote: post #207
cheriot wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don’t agree with the blanket advice of “just use Postgres.” I take it as meaning use Postgres until there's a reason not to. ie build for the scale / growth rate you have not "how will this handle the 100 million users I dream of." A simpler tech stack will be simpler to iterate on.

Postgres on modern hardware can likely service 100 million users unless you are doing something data intensive with them. You can get a few hundred TB of flash in one box these days. You need to average over 1 MB of database data per user to get over 100 TB with only 100 million users. Even then, you can mostly just shard your DB.

What about throughput? How many times can postgres commit per second on NVMe flash?

Re: It's 2026, Just Use Postgres

#226

Post by direwolf20 »

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…

Isn't it something like GRANT ALL ON DATABASE foo TO USER bar

Re: It's 2026, Just Use Postgres

#227

Post by direwolf20 »

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.

Interestingly almost all of postgres is an extension including the stuff you expect to be built in. All data types, all index types, all operators, and the implementation of ordinary tables I think

Re: It's 2026, Just Use Postgres

#228

Post by pclmulqdq »

direwolf20 wrote: post #225
pclmulqdq wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Postgres on modern hardware can likely service 100 million users unless you are doing something data intensive with them. You can get a few hundred TB of flash in one box these days. You need to average over 1 MB of database data per user to get over 100 TB with only 100 million users. Even then, you can mostly just shard your DB.

What about throughput? How many times can postgres commit per second on NVMe flash?

You can do about 100k commits per second, but this also partly depends on the CPU you attach to it. It also varies with how complicated the queries are.

With 100 million DAU, you're often going to have problems with this rate unless you batch your commits. With 100 million user accounts (or MAU), you may be fine.

Re: It's 2026, Just Use Postgres

#229

Post by direwolf20 »

getnormality wrote: post #222

How does Postgres stack up against columnar databases like Vertica and DuckDB for analytical queries?

Not great. It works but the performance isn't ideal for this case. Still the advice is sound. You can build a new analytics system when you're doing enough analytical queries on enough data to bog down the primary system.
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