alt Hacker NewsI’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.”
Replies
> I don’t agree with the blanket advice of “just use Postgres.”
I take it as meaning use Postgres until there's a reason not to. ie build for the scale / growth rate you have not "how will this handle the 100 million users I dream of." A simpler tech stack will be simpler to iterate on.
In my experience the functionality of “purpose built systems” is found in Postgres but you have to read the manual.
I personally think reading manuals and tuning is a comparably low risk form of software development.
Postgres is infinitely extensible, more than MariaDB. But it's very painful to write or configure extensions and you might as well use something different instead of reaching for an extension mechanism.
Exactly. Use cases differ. https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/mysql/difference-between-mysql...
> 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.
Oh no, not a company hiring a team of specialist in a core technology you need! What next, paying them a good wage? C'mon, it's so much better to get a bunch of random, excuse me, "specialized" SaaS tools that will _surely_ not lead to requiring five teams of specialists in random technologies that will eventually be discontinued once Google acquires the company running them.
OK but seriously, yeah sometimes "specialized" is good, though much less rarely than people pretend it to be. Having specialists ain't bad, and I'd say is better than telling a random developer to become a specialist in some cloud tech and pretending you didn't just end up turning a - hopefully decent - developer into a poor DBA. Not to mention that a small team of Postgres specialists can maintain a truly stupendous amount of Postgres.
I hate how developers are often very skeptical but all the skepticism goes out the window if the tech is sufficiently hyped up.
And TBH, developers are pretty dumb not to realize that the tech tools monoculture is a way for business folks to make us easily replaceable... If all companies use the same tech, it turns us into exchangeable commodities which can easily be replaced and sourced across different organizations.
Look at the typical React dev. They have zero leverage and can be replaced by vibe coding kiddies straight out of school or sourced from literally any company on earth. And there are some real negatives to using silver bullet tools. They're not even the best tools for a lot of cases! The React dev is a commodity and they let it happen to them. Outsmarted by dumb business folks who dropped out of college. They probably didn't even come up with the idea; the devs did. Be smarter people. They're going to be harvesting you like Cavendish.
I took it to mean “make Postgres your default choice”, not “always use Postgres no matter what”