It's 2026, Just Use Postgres

Post by Izkata » Sat, Feb 07, 2026, 4:09 AM UTC

saisrirampur wrote: post #261

strken wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bla…

Post by lima » Sat, Feb 07, 2026, 12:30 PM UTC

riku_iki wrote: post #325

lima wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Postgres is not a CP database, and even with synchronous replication, it can lose writes during network partitions. It would not pass the Jepsen test suite. This is very hard to fix and requires significant architectural changes (like Yugabyte or Neon have done).

> Postgres is not a CP database, and even with synchronous replication, it can lose writes during network partitions. Argument is that partitioning almost never happens, because of network reliably rerouting traffic.

Post by sgarland » Sat, Feb 07, 2026, 5:16 PM UTC

NuclearPM wrote: post #115

sgarland wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you think Postgres has idiosyncrasies… https://sqlite.org/quirks.html

Which one is an issue?

  sqlite> CREATE TABLE foobar (id INTEGER NOT NULL PRIMARY KEY, b BLOB NOT NULL);
  sqlite> INSERT INTO foobar (b) VALUES (10), ('10'), (0xA), ('0xA');
  sqlite> SELECT id, b, 15 > b, '15' > b, 0xF > b, '0xF' > b FROM foobar ORDER BY b;
  | id |  b    | 15 > b | '15' > b | 0xF > b | '0xF' > b |
  |----|-----  |--------|----------|---------|-----------|
  | 1  | 10    | 1      | 1        | 1       | 1         |
  | 3  | 10    | 1      | 1        | 1       | 1         |
  | 4  | '0xA' | 0      | 1        | 0       | 1         |
  | 2  | '10'  | 0      | 1        | 0       | 0         |

Post by saisrirampur » Sat, Feb 07, 2026, 6:42 PM UTC

Izkata wrote: post #331

saisrirampur wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bla…

"Just" doesn't solely mean "only", this phrase is using it in the spirit of "just do it" - meaning "stop dawdling around". "Just use postgres" is the snappy phrase you're looking for.

Post by tomhow » Sun, Feb 08, 2026, 10:36 AM UTC

johnfn wrote: post #328

tomhow wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

Hey Tom! Earnest question here - I am seeing on the order of one AI post a day on HN, sometimes more than that. It's good to know we can email in about these things, but I think most users don't understand that - certainly I didn't for the last few month as this has been going on. It would be nice if there was an affordance on the site to flag these, similar to the existing flag function. Thanks!