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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]

#51

Post by cwyers »

payamb wrote: post #35
jsmeaton wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm fairly sure I signed up for the early access program months ago and still haven't heard back. It's possible that I meant to and didn't though.

http://go.jetbrains.com/HQ0110R0QkKgjD01O6V003M

> It is important to distinguish EAP from traditional pre-release software. Please note that the quality of EAP versions may at times be way below even usual beta standards.

That... scares me, more than a little. I'm okay with it crashing, or losing queries I wrote. I really want failure cases to be restricted to NOT affecting the database, though. I'll probably stay away or try it out on my personal machine on a toy database for now.

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

#52

Post by fweespeech »

ibotty wrote: post #17
lmm wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who's used to MySQL, I keep trying to use PostgreSQL (better standards compliance, better behaviour in the face of bad data) - and I keep going back. The psql interface is awkward (too many magic backslash commands to memorize instead of SHOW CREATE TABLE) and always feels slightly laggy somehow.

You are the first person I read saying they like the mysql cli. Ctrl-c kills the whole shell. great, but not what I expect. Want to fix a small typo in your big query? In psql you can just edit your last command in your $EDITOR. Useful (but not perfect) autocomplete is also not in mysql.

> Ctrl-c kills the whole shell. great, but not what I expect.

That is actually exactly what you should expect. SIGINT cancels most things you run in the CLI.

Interrupt a ping because you forgot a count parameter? Ctrl+C

Honestly, the reason I don't use Postgres has nothing to do with the CLI and everything to do with the ecosystem for Multi-Master being inferior to Galera. But yeah, I'm happy with mysql-cli as well and don't really see the Postgres equivalent as a noteworthy improvement.

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

#53

Post by noir_lord »

lmm wrote: post #3
tempodox wrote: post #2

That title is really great, and also rings true. And of all open-source SQL DBs, PostgreSQL is superbly executed and a breeze to work with. I can only recommend it.

As someone who's used to MySQL, I keep trying to use PostgreSQL (better standards compliance, better behaviour in the face of bad data) - and I keep going back. The psql interface is awkward (too many magic backslash commands to memorize instead of SHOW CREATE TABLE) and always feels slightly laggy somehow.

If you haven't already checkout pgadmin-3, I mostly live in the cli but if I need to do something complex or write a large query I often jump into pgadmin as it's display and proper editor are excellent!.

Prefer it to MySQL Workbench even which I liked.

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

#54

Post by noir_lord »

realusername wrote: post #31
keithy wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The backslash commands are way better than having to type out SHOW TABLES; or SHOW DATABASES;, or CONNECT DATABASE X. All I have to do is \dt or \c x. It's so much better. Can't remember them? Just do \?.

That's also the problem I have, \dt,\c just don't make sense at all and I never remember them whereas 'SHOW TABLES' does not even need explanations. It's also the same thing with the unix users, I never fully understood how postgres handles user permissions. I would say that Postgres itself is really really good but the tooling around is just not there yet.

I just remembered it as \d as display and \dt as display tables.

I often invent mnemonics that only mean something to me until muscle memory kicks in.

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

#55

Post by brightball »

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?

Depends on your application. In most cases your "write heavy" is going to be isolated to 1 or 2 tables worth of data (or equivalent) and for those cases some type of NoSQL solution can be a really good option. Especially since you can use a PG foreign data wrapper to allow PG to run queries against that information too.

If it's system wide and you need PostgreSQL itself able to handle it, using PG's async features is one potential option but setting up and managing a Postgres-XC cluster would be the next best. XC allows scale-out for writes. If you're at a company with a budget for that type of thing I think I remember reading that EnterpriseDB (the PG company) is offering first class support for PG XC.

In most cases though, I find that the write heavy parts of a system are so isolated that diverting them to a simple NoSQL solution tends to be easiest (Mongo, Couchbase, DynamoDB from AWS, etc).

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

#56

Post by pmontra »

lmm wrote: post #3
tempodox wrote: post #2

That title is really great, and also rings true. And of all open-source SQL DBs, PostgreSQL is superbly executed and a breeze to work with. I can only recommend it.

As someone who's used to MySQL, I keep trying to use PostgreSQL (better standards compliance, better behaviour in the face of bad data) - and I keep going back. The psql interface is awkward (too many magic backslash commands to memorize instead of SHOW CREATE TABLE) and always feels slightly laggy somehow.

Show create table was so awkward to me after years of \d table. I remember I had to google even desc table and show databases :-)

Anyway, you might want to check http://pgcli.com/ for a free alternative cli with completion. I started using it over the standard psql and I recommend it to everybody.

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

#57

Post by knodi123 »

noir_lord wrote: post #53
lmm wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who's used to MySQL, I keep trying to use PostgreSQL (better standards compliance, better behaviour in the face of bad data) - and I keep going back. The psql interface is awkward (too many magic backslash commands to memorize instead of SHOW CREATE TABLE) and always feels slightly laggy somehow.

If you haven't already checkout pgadmin-3, I mostly live in the cli but if I need to do something complex or write a large query I often jump into pgadmin as it's display and proper editor are excellent!. Prefer it to MySQL Workbench even which I liked.

I've recently made the switch to postgres, and then I found pgadmin3, and I'm really feeling some pain.

For instance, the "explain query" visualization is great, and very helpful, but there's no way I can find to zoom out, at all. And that window doesn't support mouse scrolling. And there's no way to export the visualization somewhere else. So when I'm trying to figure out why a very, very large query is running slowly, it's agony to use pgadmin3.

Do you know any good postgres query analysis tools?

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

#58

Post by neokya »

keithy wrote: post #10
lmm wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who's used to MySQL, I keep trying to use PostgreSQL (better standards compliance, better behaviour in the face of bad data) - and I keep going back. The psql interface is awkward (too many magic backslash commands to memorize instead of SHOW CREATE TABLE) and always feels slightly laggy somehow.

The backslash commands are way better than having to type out SHOW TABLES; or SHOW DATABASES;, or CONNECT DATABASE X. All I have to do is \dt or \c x. It's so much better. Can't remember them? Just do \?.

\? is killer.

Thanks a ton, I didn't know that yet. I also find MySQL cli very easy to work. But that's going to change now, it seems.

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

#59

Post by mhd »

kaufland wrote: post #47
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.

They were pretty straight about that: Java, ExtJS, stored procedures. Not exactly candidates for the sexiest development tools alive. They were pretty honest about that, no "this will look awesome on your resume" tomfoolery.

It was a pretty great interview, and I almost took them up on their offer. So don't get me wrong, I neither want to praise their stack nor put it down, I just thought that their ubiquitous use of stored procedures was an interesting fact (and Postgres with its pluggable languages supports this pretty well, these days you can even put your js/v8 code in it, if you really want to JavaScript all the thigns).

They've got some code about it on github: https://github.com/zalando/java-sproc-wrapper

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

#60

Post by JohnBooty »

cwyers wrote: post #46
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 in…

  > What kind of data lacks any relations whatsoever?
You're right: all data has some kind of relation - when we say "non-relational data" we almost always really mean "loosely related." But some data is much more strongly related than others.

Think of a traditional RDBMS application such as an ordering system where there are strong relational constraints that need to be enforced before committing your data: ie, your order items had damn well better correlate with an order, which damn well better correlate with a user, or else nothing makes sense -- you had better raise an exception and should definitely not store those things in your database if the relational integrity is not there.

Now constrast that with other types of data collection where relational integrity is much more relaxed.

Generally, these examples would be (near) real time data collection - times when you're collecting data with a "collect first, analyze/correlate later" mentality. Specific examples would be a service that aggregates logs from a server farm in real time, or things like tracking user behavior statistics on the web. Or even an onboard computer that collects data from a car's engine - you want to read that data every 50ms no matter what, and maaaaaybe you will correlate it with events (accidents? combustion issues? whatever) later on oooooorrrr maybe not.

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