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

It's 2026, Just Use Postgres

tigerdata.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

261–270 of 349 posts

Re: It's 2026, Just Use Postgres

#261

Post by saisrirampur »

strken wrote: post #250
saisrirampur wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree to disagree here. I see a world where developers need to think about (reasonable) scale from day one, or at least very early. We’ve been seeing this play out at ClickHouse - the need for purpose-built OLAP is reducing from years to months. Also integration with ClickHouse is few weeks of effort for potentially significantly faster performance for analytics.

I see a world where developers need to think about REASONABLE scale from day one, with all caps and no parentheses. I've sat in on meetings about adding auth rate limiting, using Redis, to an on-premise electron client/Node.js server where the largest installation had 20 concurrent users and the largest foreseeable installation had a few thousand, in which every existing installation had an average server CPU utilisa…

Ack, agreed. But there’s a better way to communicate than making blanket statements like “just use Postgres.” For example, you could say “Postgres is the default database,” etc.

Don’t get me wrong—I’m a huge huge fan of Postgres. I’ve worked at Postgres companies for a decade, started a Postgres company, and now lead a Postgres service within a company! But I prefer being real rather than doing marketing hype and blanket love.

Re: It's 2026, Just Use Postgres

#262

Post by SenHeng »

cortesoft wrote: post #246
jghn wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that the key point being made by this crowd, of which I'm one, is somewhere in the middle. The way I mean it is "Make Postgres your default choice. Also *you* probably aren't doing anything special enough to warrant using something different". In other words, there are people and situations where it makes sense to use something else. But most people believing they're in that category are wrong.

> Also you probably aren't doing anything special enough to warrant using something different". I always get frustrated by this because it is never made clear where the transition occurs to where you are doing something special enough. It is always dismissed as, "well whatever it is you are doing, I am sure you don't need it" Why is this assumption always made, especially on sites like HackerNews? There are a lot of…

And another related one, you’ll know when you’ll need it.

No I don’t. I’ve never used the thing so I don’t know when it’ll come in useful.

Re: It's 2026, Just Use Postgres

#263

Post by delish »

ronbenton wrote: post #249
krick wrote: post #245

No, seriously, people need to be punished for submitting LLM-generated garbage without specifying that it's LLM-generated garbage. 400+ points, oh my god, people, what's wrong with you...

I just pasted the first paragraph in an "AI detector" app and it indeed came back as 100% AI. But I heard those things are unreliable. How did you determine this was LLM-generated? The same way?

Apart from the style of the prose, which is my subjective evaluation: This blog post is "a view from nowhere." Tiger Data is a company that sells postgres in some way (don't know, but it doesn't matter for the following): they could speak as themselves, and compare themselves to companies that sell other open source databases. Or they could showcase benchmarks _they ran_.

Them saying: "What you get: pgvectorscale uses the DiskANN algorithm (from Microsoft Research), achieving 28x lower p95 latency and 16x higher throughput than Pinecone at 99% recall" is marketing unless they give how you'd replicate those numbers.

Point being: this could have been written by an LLM, because it doesn't represent any work-done by Tiger Data.

Re: It's 2026, Just Use Postgres

#265

Post by tomnipotent »

fatbird wrote: post #179
TZubiri wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It's an older meme, but it checks out.

WiredTiger would like to have a word with you. It was made default in 2015 and fixed a broad class of issues.

Re: It's 2026, Just Use Postgres

#266

Post by direwolf20 »

pclmulqdq wrote: post #228
direwolf20 wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That should be enough for most apps.

Re: It's 2026, Just Use Postgres

#267

Post by ronsor »

Gagarin1917 wrote: post #257
krick wrote: post #245

No, seriously, people need to be punished for submitting LLM-generated garbage without specifying that it's LLM-generated garbage. 400+ points, oh my god, people, what's wrong with you...

They’re upvoting because they agree with the sentiment in the title. That’s largely how these voting sites work.

Exposing the age-old truth of "commenters and voters don't read articles" I see

Re: It's 2026, Just Use Postgres

#268

Post by kijin »

tovlier wrote: post #181
vagab0nd wrote: post #155

I recently started digging into databases for the first time since college, and from a novice's perspective, postgres is absolutely magical. You can throw in 10M+ rows across twenty columns, spread over five tables, add some indices, and get sub-100ms queries for virtually anything you want. If something doesn't work, you just ask it for an analysis and immediately know what index to add or how to fix your query. It…

"sub-100ms queries" is not a high bar to clear. Milliseconds isn't even the right measurement.

In a typical CRUD web app, any query that takes milliseconds instead of microseconds should be viewed with suspicion.

In a more charitable interpretation, maybe the parent is talking about sub-100ms total round trip time for an API call over the public internet.

Re: It's 2026, Just Use Postgres

#269

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]
Post reply on HN