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“Fashion Is Hard. PostgreSQL Is Easy” [video]

tech.zalando.com

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Re: “Fashion Is Hard. PostgreSQL Is Easy” [video]

#41

Post by kaufland »

pavlov wrote: post #36
kaufland wrote: post #8

Hmm, looking a bit at their site[1]: Addidas jogging pants -- 59,95 € Volcom T-shirt print -- 17,45 € Under Armour T-shirt -- 39.95 € Like really now -- who needs this stuff? Especially when you can just go to Aldi or Tchibo (or any of a number of other discount retailers readily visible at nearly every shopping mall in Germany) and buy essentially same stuff (minus the logos, of course) for 1/10th of the price. So p…

A t-shirt for 1.75 € is so cheap that it's practically guaranteed to have been manufactured in dangerous conditions in a place like Bangladesh or Ethiopia. Big brands like Adidas or Under Armour don't have a clean track record either, but at least they are somewhat accountable to consumers because their #1 asset is their reputation. To fix global trade, it's better to do a bit of research into what kind of company yo…

I was extremifying a bit my comparison; but the basic point is that the 10x price difference is in no way proportionate to any real infrastructure costs that would be necessary to guarantee safer (or non-exploitive) product standards. I can see the same no-name, barely-fitting (but otherwise generally quite adequate) apparel products from the major discounters costing 2x or 3x if produced at gold standards (environmentally or labor-wise); but not 10x.

That is, at the end of the day, 80% of the 10x overhead you pay at the premium retailers is just for the brand, not for safer products or better labor conditions (which are at best a secondary matter of concern to these outlets).

Re: “Fashion Is Hard. PostgreSQL Is Easy” [video]

#42

Post by collyw »

pavlov wrote: post #36
kaufland wrote: post #8

Hmm, looking a bit at their site[1]: Addidas jogging pants -- 59,95 € Volcom T-shirt print -- 17,45 € Under Armour T-shirt -- 39.95 € Like really now -- who needs this stuff? Especially when you can just go to Aldi or Tchibo (or any of a number of other discount retailers readily visible at nearly every shopping mall in Germany) and buy essentially same stuff (minus the logos, of course) for 1/10th of the price. So p…

A t-shirt for 1.75 € is so cheap that it's practically guaranteed to have been manufactured in dangerous conditions in a place like Bangladesh or Ethiopia. Big brands like Adidas or Under Armour don't have a clean track record either, but at least they are somewhat accountable to consumers because their #1 asset is their reputation. To fix global trade, it's better to do a bit of research into what kind of company yo…

Sure, but is there any evidence that paying more for a brand name is going to avoid that? Nike doesn't exactly have the best reputation with this sort of thing.

Re: “Fashion Is Hard. PostgreSQL Is Easy” [video]

#43

Post by [deleted] »

webjunkie wrote: post #16
kaufland wrote: post #8

Hmm, looking a bit at their site[1]: Addidas jogging pants -- 59,95 € Volcom T-shirt print -- 17,45 € Under Armour T-shirt -- 39.95 € Like really now -- who needs this stuff? Especially when you can just go to Aldi or Tchibo (or any of a number of other discount retailers readily visible at nearly every shopping mall in Germany) and buy essentially same stuff (minus the logos, of course) for 1/10th of the price. So p…

You always get what you pay for. I'd rather not buy too cheap and wear toxic stuff: http://www.welt.de/wirtschaft/article133578674/Greenpeace-wa...

[deleted]

Re: “Fashion Is Hard. PostgreSQL Is Easy” [video]

#44

Post by feedjoelpie »

comrade1 wrote: post #24

Are they using Postgres for content, or for data? (at a place where I can't really watch a movie) There are some great content management tools out there, my favorite being apache jackrabbit, and on top of that, apache sling for displaying/accessing the content. It requires a different way of thinking than the standard mvc process - it is a more content focused display process. I don't know... if you're using Postgre…

Postgres provides really nice features for non-relational data these days, though. JSON columns are nice. Hstore is fantastic. And you can even do pubsub. All without introducing another database system into your stack. Is it perfect for all software? I'm sure not. But 99% of everything I ever need can be had with Postgres + Elasticsearch.

Re: “Fashion Is Hard. PostgreSQL Is Easy” [video]

#45

Post by fennecfoxen »

escherize wrote: post #34
brightball wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's probably the best way of looking at it. PostgreSQL is generally going to be the best solution for 90% of your data, short of having a subset that's write heavy to the point of streaming.

What is a good space to look at when you get write heavy data to the point of streaming?

Depending on your exact needs, Cassandra's not a bad idea for this space. O(n) scalablity for write capacity (+), and even on an individual node it's pretty write-friendly: its sstable data structures stream to disk well, keeping spinning disks happy while avoiding write amplification issues on SSDs. It does help if the data is nicely shardable, of course.

That's the one I'm familiar with, anyway.

(+) Write capacity is O(n) as you add machines but an individual write's time is pretty constant and cluster-wide maintenance operations do start taking longer as you add machines and they gossip to each other. It's not magic, obviously :)

Re: “Fashion Is Hard. PostgreSQL Is Easy” [video]

#46

Post by cwyers »

comrade1 wrote: post #24

Are they using Postgres for content, or for data? (at a place where I can't really watch a movie) There are some great content management tools out there, my favorite being apache jackrabbit, and on top of that, apache sling for displaying/accessing the content. It requires a different way of thinking than the standard mvc process - it is a more content focused display process. I don't know... if you're using Postgre…

> I don't know... if you're using Postgres to store non-relational data you may want to reassess your strategy.

What kind of data lacks any relations whatsoever? Yes, there are cases where fitting data to the relational model is more awkward than others. But I would be really, really cautious about thinking that I could design on my own a data model that's better than the relational model. Relational databases are incredibly battle-tested across every type of data storage problem out there.

Re: “Fashion Is Hard. PostgreSQL Is Easy” [video]

#47

Post by kaufland »

mhd wrote: post #39

I had a job interview at Zalando a while ago, and apart from the huge bunch of bananas at the entrance to the developer's den, the one thing I remember most about was the fact that apparently they're using stored procedures for basically any database transaction. Which is probably a more unorthodox use of databases these days, at least for Postgres (I've heard it was more common for SQL Server and I once had the ques…

It's quite common for startups to have 1 or 2 sexy (and well-enough engineered) projects involving your favorite technology X, to run up the flagpole at conferences or in job ads, etc. But like as not, 80% of what they do (and of what you'll be doing as a developer there) is the same half-baked, post-"blitzkrieg" mop-up work you'll be doing pretty much anywhere else.

Re: “Fashion Is Hard. PostgreSQL Is Easy” [video]

#48

Post by emilburzo »

I love PostgreSQL.

But for a personal project I went with MongoDB, because my data set was a perfect match for mongo's design.

Now I love mongo too, I'm amazed with how easy it has been to maintain 100% uptime on comodity hardware (one server is literally in a room in my apartment) through all the random server downtimes, upgrades, migrations, etc.

And now I have more ideas for some personal projects, and they would go very well with postgres, but I'm so missing replica sets from mongo.

If postgres would have something similar to replica sets in mongodb, that would be amazing.

Re: “Fashion Is Hard. PostgreSQL Is Easy” [video]

#49

Post by lxfontes »

vassy wrote: post #15

Two years ago I switched from PHP and MySQL to Ruby and PostgreSQL. The only thing I'm missing is Sequel Pro. PG Admin is ok, does everything I need, but that interface is ugly and unintuitive. [1] http://www.sequelpro.com/

Have been using postico https://eggerapps.at/postico/ for day to day queries and pgadmin for more hardcore operations

Re: “Fashion Is Hard. PostgreSQL Is Easy” [video]

#50

Post by juliangregorian »

vassy wrote: post #15

Two years ago I switched from PHP and MySQL to Ruby and PostgreSQL. The only thing I'm missing is Sequel Pro. PG Admin is ok, does everything I need, but that interface is ugly and unintuitive. [1] http://www.sequelpro.com/

You might try Valentina Studio.
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