alt Hacker NewsLots of the alternatives that this site claims Postgres will do are things you'd only consider well past the point that Postgres would be viable.
Kafka? No one wants to operate Kafka, if it's a serious contender it's because you need things only it can do. Same with Elasticsearch, it sucks to operate, sucks to build a second stack just for search, so you'd only consider it at the point that Postgres is no longer suitable. Same with Snowflake.
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Never used Kafka, mostly cause I've been afraid to learn something called Kafka.
As the sibling comment from eximius mentions, devs will routinely reach for these long before they’re remotely needed.
A well-tuned Postgres installation on fast hardware and intelligent schema design can scale incredibly far, even if you’re asking it to double as a message bus and full-text search tool.
Is that not kinda the point?
People reach for the things you mentioned wayyyyyy before they should.
Just because you want something queue shaped or search, doesn't mean you should reach for the big, specialized, expensive technology, when Postgres can already support it in your existing infrastructure up until some significant scale you often won't surpass.