Live data from Hacker News

An interview on what makes Postgres unique: extensions

craigkerstiens.com

1–10 of 15 posts

Re: An interview on what makes Postgres unique: extensions

#2
My little business uses PG. Had a unique need for PK IDs. It was pretty easy to make a little extension in C to generate them for us, and linking in PG was super easy (but the .so has to be on replica before loading) and we only used the TEXT type cause I didn't want to figure out making a new 128bit data-type. But can't do this in RDS.

Re: An interview on what makes Postgres unique: extensions

#4
Storing data is the most universal task in the software ecosystem. Data storage will be confronted as a problem by everyone even tangentially related to software - the Truly Inspired Software Engineer, the Almost Incompetent Software Engineer, the Developer, the Manager, the Lawyers. The Customers will care, sooner or later it becomes their problem. The Subcontractors care. Even the Government cares about data storage.

It is a not a problem where 'unique' or 'customised' are competitive advantages. 'Boring', 'available', 'reliable' and 'well understood' are competitive advantages. Relational databases are a great way to store small quantities of arbitrary data and PostgreSQL is a textbook relational database.

Re: An interview on what makes Postgres unique: extensions

#5
post #2

My little business uses PG. Had a unique need for PK IDs. It was pretty easy to make a little extension in C to generate them for us, and linking in PG was super easy (but the .so has to be on replica before loading) and we only used the TEXT type cause I didn't want to figure out making a new 128bit data-type. But can't do this in RDS.

Interesting, sounds (without more detail) like uuid datatype / uuid-ossp (which is available on rds)?

Re: An interview on what makes Postgres unique: extensions

#6
post #4

Storing data is the most universal task in the software ecosystem. Data storage will be confronted as a problem by everyone even tangentially related to software - the Truly Inspired Software Engineer, the Almost Incompetent Software Engineer, the Developer, the Manager, the Lawyers. The Customers will care, sooner or later it becomes their problem. The Subcontractors care. Even the Government cares about data storag…

>PostgreSQL is a textbook relational database

Except for using the OS Page cache and not managing the buffer pool (very much) itself. It's the only database that does it that way.

Re: An interview on what makes Postgres unique: extensions

#7
post #2

My little business uses PG. Had a unique need for PK IDs. It was pretty easy to make a little extension in C to generate them for us, and linking in PG was super easy (but the .so has to be on replica before loading) and we only used the TEXT type cause I didn't want to figure out making a new 128bit data-type. But can't do this in RDS.

Interesting, sounds (without more detail) like uuid datatype / uuid-ossp (which is available on rds)?

ULID - https://github.com/ulid/spec it's like 48bits of control and 80 bits of power packed into 128bits of fun!!

Re: An interview on what makes Postgres unique: extensions

#8
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting, sounds (without more detail) like uuid datatype / uuid-ossp (which is available on rds)?

ULID - https://github.com/ulid/spec it's like 48bits of control and 80 bits of power packed into 128bits of fun!!

Why store it as text rather than raw bytes?
Post reply on HN