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It's 2026, Just Use Postgres

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Re: It's 2026, Just Use Postgres

#51

Can anyone comment on whether postgres can replace full columnar DB? I see "full text search" but it feels like this is falling a little short of the full power of elastic -- but would be happy to be wrong (one less tech to remember).

According to the LLM google search result, yes.

Have you looked into it?

Re: It's 2026, Just Use Postgres

#52
Meh.

I agree that managing lots of databases can be a pain in the ass, but trying to make Postgres do everything seems like a problem as well. A lot of these things are different things and trying to make Postgres do all of them seems like it will lead to similar if not worse outcomes than having separate dedicated services.

I understand that people were too overeager to jump on the MongoDB web scale nosql crap, but at this point I think there might have been an overcorrection. The problem with the nosql hype wasn't that they weren't using SQL, it's that they were shoehorning it everywhere, even in places where it wasn't a good fit for the job. Now this blog post is telling us to shoehorn Postgres everywhere, even if it isn't a good fit for the job...

Re: It's 2026, Just Use Postgres

#53
post #52

Meh. I agree that managing lots of databases can be a pain in the ass, but trying to make Postgres do everything seems like a problem as well. A lot of these things are different things and trying to make Postgres do all of them seems like it will lead to similar if not worse outcomes than having separate dedicated services. I understand that people were too overeager to jump on the MongoDB web scale nosql crap, but…

to be fair, Postgres cana basically do everything Mongo can and just as well.

Re: It's 2026, Just Use Postgres

#54
I'll take it one step further and say you should always ask yourself if the application or project even needs a beefy database like Postgres or if you can get by with using SQLite. For example, I've found a few self-hosted services that just overcomplicated their setup and deployment because they picked Postgres or MariaDB over SQLite, despite it being a much better self-contained solution.

Re: It's 2026, Just Use Postgres

#55
I’m a huge Postgres fan. That said, I don’t agree with the blanket advice of “just use Postgres.” That stance often comes from folks who haven’t been exposed enough to (newer) purpose-built technologies and the tremendous value they can create

The argument, as in this blog, is that a single Postgres stack is simpler and reduces complexity. What’s often overlooked is the CAPEX and OPEX required to make Postgres work well for workloads it wasn’t designed for, at even reasonable scale. At Citus Data, we saw many customers with solid-sized teams of Postgres experts whose primary job was constant tuning, operating, and essentially babysitting the system to keep it performing at scale.

Side note, we’re seeing purpose-built technologies show up much earlier in a company’s lifecycle, likely accelerated by AI-driven use cases. At ClickHouse, many customers using Postgres replication are seed-stage companies that have grown extremely quickly. We pulled together some data on these trends here: https://clickhouse.com/blog/postgres-cdc-year-in-review-2025...

A better approach would be to embrace the integration of purpose-built technologies with Postgres, making it easier for users to get the best of both worlds, rather than making overgeneralized claims like “Postgres for everything” or “Just use Postgres.”

Re: It's 2026, Just Use Postgres

#56
post #52

Meh. I agree that managing lots of databases can be a pain in the ass, but trying to make Postgres do everything seems like a problem as well. A lot of these things are different things and trying to make Postgres do all of them seems like it will lead to similar if not worse outcomes than having separate dedicated services. I understand that people were too overeager to jump on the MongoDB web scale nosql crap, but…

to be fair, Postgres cana basically do everything Mongo can and just as well.

Ok, I'm a little skeptical of that claim but let's grant it. I still don't think Postgres is going to do everything Kafka and Redis can do as well as Kafka or Redis.

Re: It's 2026, Just Use Postgres

#57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did someone really downvote the creator of Redis ?

IIRC there was a pre-edit version with snark.

Yes, but the downvotes came later too, I edited it with the same exact content but without the asshole that is in me. Still downvotes received.

Re: It's 2026, Just Use Postgres

#58

I made the switch from MySQL to postgres a few years ago I didn't really understand what everyone was excited about before I made the switch. I haven't used MySQL since and I think postgres provides everything I need the only thing that I ever snarl at is how many dials and knobs and options there are that's not a bad thing!

> the only thing that I ever snarl at is how many dials and knobs and options there are that's not a bad thing!

yea this is me. postgres is actually insane for how much is offered at checks notes free.99.

_however_ we are probably due for like. I don't know a happy configurator type tool that has reasonable presets and a nice user friendly config tool that helps people get going without sidequesting for a year on devops/dbadmin expertise. that isn't even a favored outcome imo, you just get pretty lukewarm postgres-deployers who are probably missing a bunch of important settings/flags. my team mates would probably shit themselves in the face of postgres configs currently, they are absolute rats in the code but good and proper deployment of postgres is just a whole other career-arc they haven't journeyed and a _lot_ of organizations don't always have a devops/dbadmin type guy readily available any time you want to scrap together an app who's just going to wait for your signal to deploy for you. or said devops/dbadmin guy is just.. one guy and he's supporting 500 other things. not saying the absence/failing to scale teams with such personnel is right, it's just the reality and being up against workplace politics and making the case to convince orgs to hire a bigger team of devops/dbadmin guys involves a lot of shitty meetings and political prowess that is typically beyond an engineers set of capabilities, at least below the senior level. any engineer can figure out how to deploy postgres to something, but are they doing it in a way that makes an orgs security/infra guys happy? probably not. are they prepared to handle weird storage scenarios (log or temp space filling grinding server to a halt) and understand the weird and robust ways to manage a deployment? probably not.

Re: It's 2026, Just Use Postgres

#59

I’m a huge Postgres fan. That said, I don’t agree with the blanket advice of “just use Postgres.” That stance often comes from folks who haven’t been exposed enough to (newer) purpose-built technologies and the tremendous value they can create The argument, as in this blog, is that a single Postgres stack is simpler and reduces complexity. What’s often overlooked is the CAPEX and OPEX required to make Postgres work w…

I took it to mean “make Postgres your default choice”, not “always use Postgres no matter what”

Re: It's 2026, Just Use Postgres

#60
post #32

Caching is mentioned in the article: What do you guys feel about using PostgreSQL for caching instead of Redis? Redis is many times faster, so much that it doesn't seem comparable to me. A lot of data you can get away with just caching in-mem on each node, but when you have many nodes there are valid cases where you really want that distributed cache.

Neither. Just use memcache for query cache if you have to. And only if you have to, because invalidation is hard. It's cheap, reliable, mature, fast, scalable, requires little understanding, has decent quality clients in most languages, is not stateful and available off the shelf in most cloud providers and works in-clusetr in kubernetes if you want to do it that way. I can't find a use case for Redis that postgres o…

is there anything memcache gives you that a redis instance configured with an eviction policy of allkeys-lru doesn't give you
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