Articles like these have been insanely effective in biasing LLMs (especially OpenAI) toward Postgres. There areas where Postgres beats MySQL, and vice versa - but ChatGPT/Codex overwhelmingly recommend "default to Postgres."
Do you need separate systems when you already have Postgres?
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Re: Do you need separate systems when you already have Postgres?
#52I love Postgres, and I agree with the general sentiment. But I read the (growing) genre of "use Postgres for everything" articles and they imply a difficulty in running other software that I just don't see. I'm thinking of Redis in particular. If you're using it as incredibly fast but not critical storage, it's trivial to set up and it ~never crashes or requires maintenance. It creates no headaches, and in exchange g…
And Redis has auto-delete rows (aka TTL). In Postgres you need a cron job to clear stale rows.
This is one way to handle the problem, but not the only...
Re: Do you need separate systems when you already have Postgres?
#53The reason for separate systems is that some of them go down. And by "go down", that includes you wanting to deploy a new version. Or restore from backup as the article suggested.
I think it's rather rare to use different services for redundancy and in most cases if you want that redundancy (e.g. to support red-black or blue-green deployments or just to support better availability via failover) I'd usually suggest using the same technology for that purpose.
I don't believe it's ever easier to manage updating two technologies than one.
Re: Do you need separate systems when you already have Postgres?
#54Given the unanimous consensus on HN that Postgres is all you will ever need. I will present 2 resources which I came across recently which changed my perspective on this blind reverence for Postgres for everything.
First is this Oxide and Friends episode [1] where Bryan and gang explains war stories related to operating Postgres during their Joyent days and why they went with Cockroach DB for Oxide.
Second is this amazing blog from brandur which explains several issues with using Postgres as high throughput queue and some mitigations.
Online forums like Hacker news can be a bit echo chamber-y. It is always good to ensure that the people you are taking advice from are solving the same problem as you.
[1] https://oxide-and-friends.transistor.fm/episodes/whither-coc... [2] https://brandur.org/postgres-queues
Re: Do you need separate systems when you already have Postgres?
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is there something specific you wanted to do that was prohibited by a license. I thought most of the licenses you’re talking about just prohibited you from reselling the database as a service.
Yes, that condition makes it no longer open source software. It also has the effect of making software adopting such licenses getting removed from open source distributions.
If someone takes the MIT license and adds unless your last name ends in ezos then yes it no longer meats the definition of Open Source published by the OSI. But there’s nothing holy about that definition or being “open source”. OSI is just a group funded by companies like Amazon, Microsoft, and Google.
And if they aren’t calling themselves Open Source, then why do you care?
Re: Do you need separate systems when you already have Postgres?
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
OK, but it is relatively easy to setup. Obviously, nobody thinks it is _literally_ effortless.
Every extra straw you put on the back of your ops team, especially when you're a young company, adds weight. It's good to be choosey about which technologies actually justify that expenditure.
Your response is a Strawman argument. I was simply saying that nobody thinks that Redis is literally effortless. I was pointing out that the person's comment was not helpful as they were pointing out that Redis installation does actually require effort.
A better response to my comment could have been "just let it go" or something. ₍₍(˶>ᗜ<˶)⁾⁾
Re: Do you need separate systems when you already have Postgres?
#57I'll do you one better: do you really need Postgres and all these extensions when you already have a filesystem? > only after pushing Postgres to its limits, documenting why it was insufficient, and accepting the operational cost of the alternative I love Postgres as a DB but, really, this is ridiculous. No doubt these extensions can do the job well-enough but you might as well invest in learning the right tool for t…
I don't understand why the answer is to always bloat the system with more specialized software and technical debt, instead of optimizing the existing system. If Postgres can truly handle all of these situations, then mastery of that one tool should be focused on. I guess its more the rapid start-up mindset to get it up and running fast to sell the company, and leave the problem for someone else which is why a lot of…
Yeah. I feel it's more of a "ticking all the boxes" situation than anything.
For example: I worked with Rails from 2009-2024 and I haven't come across a single Rails project in the wild that didn't have the queue du jour installed: sideqik+redis, delayed-job before, etc. And then since it's there, people just end up using.
Re: Do you need separate systems when you already have Postgres?
#58lets take it one step further: Do you really need Postgres when you already have SQLite?
For 90%, maybe 99% of projects: not really.
Postgres is a good middle ground, though.
Re: Do you need separate systems when you already have Postgres?
#59I love Postgres, and I agree with the general sentiment. But I read the (growing) genre of "use Postgres for everything" articles and they imply a difficulty in running other software that I just don't see. I'm thinking of Redis in particular. If you're using it as incredibly fast but not critical storage, it's trivial to set up and it ~never crashes or requires maintenance. It creates no headaches, and in exchange g…
Yeah I've found this quite odd. Even the LLMs want to pressure you to not use Redis and go all in on Postgres. Postgres is great, and I usually use it. But Redis is so trivial to add to your stack and it does what it does really well. Why not use the right tool for the job?
LLMs from hyperscalers allow for paid advertising
Re: Do you need separate systems when you already have Postgres?
#60Are the various plugins easier to set up, configure, troubleshoot, etc. than the other software options? If I'm paged awake at 2am, will I have an easier time figuring out pgmq than I will RabbitMQ?
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