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

Re: It's 2026, Just Use Postgres

#271

Post by tomhow » Fri, Feb 06, 2026, 3:30 AM UTC

direwolf20 wrote: post #224

saisrirampur wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

We do the opposite, in fact [1]. Negative stories about YC-funded companies (or YC itself) are given greater visibility than equivalent stories about non-YC-related entities.

When YC-funded companies are featured in Launch HN or Show HN posts, it's clearly denoted in the title or top-text. YC-funded companies don't get preferential treatment in the rankings for any type of post other than Launch HN posts.

ClickHouse isn't a YC-funded company. We don't penalize people for mentioning their employer in the comments unless it's blatantly promotional, in which case it breaks the guideline against promotional posting, and such comments should be flagged by the community.

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

Re: It's 2026, Just Use Postgres

#272

Post by kijin » Fri, Feb 06, 2026, 3:32 AM UTC

TZubiri wrote: post #256

olivia-banks wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I hear there's a great tool for this, DB null or something like that.

MySQL actually has a BLACKHOLE storage engine designed specifically for universe-scale data storage for those who don't care about persistence.

Re: It's 2026, Just Use Postgres

#273

Post by kccqzy » Fri, Feb 06, 2026, 3:35 AM UTC

kijin wrote: post #268

tovlier wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

But OP never said it's a CRUD app. Maybe OP did some experimentation with OLAP use cases.

Re: It's 2026, Just Use Postgres

#274

Post by chamomeal » Fri, Feb 06, 2026, 3:36 AM UTC

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?

It’s got that LLM flow to it. Also liberal use of formatting. It’s like it cannot possibly emphasize enough. Tries to make every word hit as hard as possible. Theres no filler, nothing slightly tangential or off topic to add color. Just many vapid points rapid fire, as if they’re the hardest hitting truth of the decade lol

Re: It's 2026, Just Use Postgres

#275

Post by niobe » Fri, Feb 06, 2026, 3:39 AM UTC

chasil wrote: post #260

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…

I am a DBA for Oracle databases, and XE can be used for free. It has the reference SQL/PSM implementation in PL/SQL. I know how to set up a physical standby, and otherwise I know how to run it. That being said, Oracle Database SE2 is $17,500 per core pair on x86, and Enterprise is $47,500 per core pair. XE has hard limits on size and limits on active CPUs. XE also does not get patches; if there is a critical vulnerab…

Postgres has a large manual not because it's overly complex to do simple things, but because it is one of the best documented and most well-written tools around, period. Every time I've had occasion to browse the manual in the last 20 years it's impressed me.

Re: It's 2026, Just Use Postgres

#276

Post by chamomeal » Fri, Feb 06, 2026, 3:40 AM UTC

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 know everybody just wants to talk about Postgres but it’s still sad to see any sort of engagement with slop. Even though the actual article is essentially irrelevant lol

Re: It's 2026, Just Use Postgres

#277

Post by tomhow » Fri, Feb 06, 2026, 3:41 AM UTC

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...

We buried the post for seeming obviously-LLM-generated. But please email us about these (hn@ycombinator.com) rather than posting public accusations.

There are two reasons why emailing us is better:

First, the negative consequences of a false allegation outweigh the benefits of a valid accusation.

Second and more important: we'll likely see an email sooner than we'll see a comment, so we can nip it in the bud quickly, rather leaving it sitting on the front page for hours.

Re: It's 2026, Just Use Postgres

#278

Post by tim-- » Fri, Feb 06, 2026, 3:41 AM UTC

delish wrote: post #263

ronbenton wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 use…

For what it's worth, TigerData is the company that develops TimescaleDB, a very popular and performant time series database provided as a Postgres extension. I'm surprised that the fact that TigerData is behind it is not mentioned anywhere in the blog post. (Though, TimescaleDB is mentioned 14 times on the page).

Re: It's 2026, Just Use Postgres

#279

Post by groundzeros2015 » Fri, Feb 06, 2026, 3:41 AM UTC

direwolf20 wrote: post #233

groundzeros2015 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Materialized views work pretty well in Postgres. But yes at some level of load it’s just helpful to have the traffic shared elsewhere. But As soon as you go outside Postgres you cannot guarantee consistent reads within a transaction. That’s usually ok, but it’s a good enough reason to keep it in until you absolutely need to.

Materialised views don't work well in postgres. They don't incrementally update and have to be manually triggered to rebuild from scratch

Sure, I guess it depends on the use case.

Re: It's 2026, Just Use Postgres

#280

Post by dddgghhbbfblk » Fri, Feb 06, 2026, 3:44 AM UTC

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?

ChatGPT has a pretty obvious writing style at the moment. It's not a question of some nebulous "AI detector" gotcha, it's more just basic human pattern matching. The abundant bullet points, copious bold text, pithy one line summarizing assertions ("In the AI era, simplicity isn’t just elegant. It’s essential."). There are so many more in just how it structures its writing (eg "Let’s address this head-on."). Hard to enumerate everything, frankly.