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0 pointsdanpalmer3d ago0 comments

Lots 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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8 comments · 3 top-level

eximius3d ago· 2 in thread

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.

nemothekid3d ago

>People reach for the things you mentioned wayyyyyy before they should.

Most orgs are probably due for a technical reassessment. Scale that I believe would have melted postgres in the past now just runs fine. CPUs got a ton faster and memory got cheaper.

Projects that would have required a complex distributed setup 10 years ago can now be handled by a single machine. For a lot of use cases, CPUs got faster than population growth.

jabwd3d ago

The amount of redis-as-database, or X really, that I see deployed that practically make no sense is insane. I haven't run the numbers to make my following claim based on anything but my feelings, but just incompetent dev alone is probably what keeps cloud computing alive.

frollogaston3d ago· 2 in thread

Never used Kafka, mostly cause I've been afraid to learn something called Kafka.

rmunn3d ago

You don't want to know what kind of bugs (massive bugs) you'd run into.

arunix3d ago

Can you say more about those bugs?

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sgarland3d ago· 1 in thread

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.

danpalmerOP3d ago

Maybe I'm lucky, but I've not seen this. Sure I've seen this from junior developers who aren't thinking through the actual requirements they have, but I've not seen it on a team with any real level of experience.

I have seen many cases of people decrying the use of some of these without understanding the requirements though. People with strong opinions like to make up their own requirements without necessarily listening to the business, considering the team, considering the existing solutions, etc.

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