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franckpachotyesterday at 4:55 PM0 repliesview on HN

It's largely cultural. In the SQL world, people are used to accepting the absence of real HA (resilience to failure, where transactions continue without interruption) and instead rely on fast DR (stop the service, recover, check for data loss, start the service). In practice, this means that all connections are rolled back, clients must reconnect to a replica known to be in synchronous commit, and everything restarts with a cold cache.

Yet they still call it HA because there's nothing else. Even a planned shutdown of the primary to patch the OS results in downtime, as all connections are terminated. The situation is even worse for major database upgrades: stop the application, upgrade the database, deploy a new release of the app because some features are not compatible between versions, test, re-analyze the tables, reopen the database, and only then can users resume work.

Everything in SQL/RDBMS was thought for a single-node instance, not including replicas. It's not HA because there can be only one read-write instance at a time. They even claim to be more ACID than MongoDB, but the ACID properties are guaranteed only on a single node.

One exception is Oracle RAC, but PostgreSQL has nothing like that. Some forks, like YugabyteDB, provide real HA with most PostgreSQL features.

About the hype: many applications that run on PostgreSQL accept hours of downtime, planned or unplanned. Those who run larger, more critical applications on PostgreSQL are big companies with many expert DBAs who can handle the complexity of database automation. And use logical replication for upgrades. But no solution offers both low operational complexity and high availability that can be comparable to MongoDB