Thoughts on PostgreSQL in 2024 • Hacker News Board

Re: Thoughts on PostgreSQL in 2024

#51

Post by abhibeckert » Thu, Jan 04, 2024, 5:02 AM UTC

riku_iki wrote: post #29

abhibeckert wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because compression is robbing Peter to pay Paul. It saves money on storage, but costs money in compute. And a lot of data is already compressed (images, etc) so might increase your compute cost without any storage savings. Filesystems are often the wrong level in the stack to do compression. You want individual control over what data is compressed.

> so might increase your compute cost without any storage savings. I agree with this point, but I think those online compression algorithms add very little overhead, so it is mostly about if Postgres adds enough other benefits compared to your current DB. The bigger issue potentially is that ext4 is faster than zfs and btrfs itself regardless of compression.

The compression penalty is actually massive. The bytes you're trying to read might require reading other bytes elsewhere on the disk in order to decompress them.

It's not just compute power, I was generalising with that statement. The real world speed hit can be as bad as read speeds an order of magnitude slower than if you disable compression.

You really only want to compress data where it makes sense to compress it.

Re: Thoughts on PostgreSQL in 2024

#52

Post by riku_iki » Thu, Jan 04, 2024, 5:15 AM UTC

abhibeckert wrote: post #51

riku_iki wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> so might increase your compute cost without any storage savings. I agree with this point, but I think those online compression algorithms add very little overhead, so it is mostly about if Postgres adds enough other benefits compared to your current DB. The bigger issue potentially is that ext4 is faster than zfs and btrfs itself regardless of compression.

The compression penalty is actually massive. The bytes you're trying to read might require reading other bytes elsewhere on the disk in order to decompress them. It's not just compute power, I was generalising with that statement. The real world speed hit can be as bad as read speeds an order of magnitude slower than if you disable compression. You really only want to compress data where it makes sense to compress it…

> The bytes you're trying to read might require reading other bytes elsewhere on the disk in order to decompress them.

data is compressed and decompressed in blocks..

Re: Thoughts on PostgreSQL in 2024

#53

Post by abhibeckert » Thu, Jan 04, 2024, 5:16 AM UTC

chuckadams wrote: post #31

abhibeckert wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I run a service that sells theatre tickets and, far more critically, a service to check if a ticket is valid or not. Tickets are checked, by scanning a QR code, as people walk though the door. Not only do people hate sitting in their seat waiting (or worse, standing in line waiting)... you also need to pay a couple hundred employees to stand around and do nothing while waiting - ballpark cost of wages might be $5 for…

> Alec Baldwin was shot and killed by a "prop" gun Alec Baldwin is alive and well and is the guy who shot someone with a REAL gun, which had nothing to do with anyone’s lunch breaks.

Sorry my mistake. I guess the wrong name stuck in my head.

Using real guns is totally normal, because they fire real explosives (so you get a muzzle flash) which can and occasionally do kill people - the only difference between a proper gun and the ones they use in movies is you need to be a lot closer to the movie weapon to be killed by it.

What's not normal is a lack of adequate safety checks around handling of the weapons and there were severe complaints about inadequate breaks for crew and even unconfirmed reports of other people injured by prop guns prior to that day on the same film set. It can be a really difficult issue to deal with - you have literally thousands of people to coordinate.

Exact details of what happened in the Alec Baldwin case are unclear, manslaughter chargers are still winding through the courts, and they include a charge of tampering with evidence which means we may never find out what really happened.

What I can say, working in the acting industry, is I have often been tired (back to back 22 hour shifts where you're forced to eat and drink while working will do that to you) and I've made mistakes while operating in those conditions and seen other people make mistakes that resulted in serious injuries. Managing breaks is a real problem in the industry and technical difficulties are one of the most common causes of delays.