alt Hacker News> 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.
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quotemstr • today at 12:25 AM
Yes. That's a good framing. PostgreSQL is a good default for online LOB-y things. There are all sorts of reasons to use something other than PostgreSQL, but raw performance at scale becomes such a reason later than you think.
Cloud providers will rent you enormous beasts of machines that, while expensive, will remain cheaper than rewriting for a migration for a long time.
Postgres on modern hardware can likely service 100 million users unless you are doing something data intensive with them.
You can get a few hundred TB of flash in one box these days. You need to average over 1 MB of database data per user to get over 100 TB with only 100 million users. Even then, you can mostly just shard your DB.