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avmichtoday at 12:19 AM3 repliesview on HN

I have two fundamental problems with Postgres - an excellent piece of technology, no questions about that.

First, to use Postgres for all those cases you have to learn various aspects of Postgres. Postgres isn't a unified tool which can do everything - instead it's a set of tools under the same umbrella. As a result, you don't save much from similarly learning all those different systems and using Postgres only as a RDBMS. And if something isn't implemented in Postgres better than in a 3rd party system, it could be easier to replace that 3rd party system - just one part of the system - rather than switching from Postgres-only to Postgres-and-then-some. In other words, Postgres has little benefits when many technologies are needed comparing with the collection of separate tools. The article notwithstanding.

Second, Postgres is written for HDDs - hard disk drives, with their patterns of data access and times. Today we usually work with SSDs, and we'd benefit from having SSD-native RDBMSes. They exist, and Postgres may lose to them - both in simplicity and performance - significantly enough.

Still, Postgres is pretty good, yes.


Replies

sbayetatoday at 1:03 AM

Never heard about postgresql being written for hdds. Could you provide a source?

show 1 reply
natnattoday at 2:52 AM

This really isn't true. You should use different parameters (specifically, you can reduce the random_page_cost to a little over 1) on a SSD but there isn't a really compelling reason to use a completely different DBMS for SSDs.

dimgltoday at 2:17 AM

SSD-native RDBMS sounds good in theory! What's in mean in practice? What relational databases are simpler and more performant? Point me in their direction!