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IMO the main advantage for RethinkDB is its HA story. Last time I had to manage a PostgreSQL cluster (2012-2013) its HA story was pretty bad. It was limited to

IMO the main advantage for RethinkDB is its HA story. Last time I had to manage a PostgreSQL cluster (2012-2013) its HA story was pretty bad. It was limited to a master-slave(s) setup with manual failover and manual cluster rebuilding all dependent on incomplete 3rd party tools. Has PostgreSQL improved on this? A quick googling leads me to believe it hasn't and I'd only even consider it again if it were managed by a 3rd party (eg. aws rds).

api 10y ago
If you want a managed solution RedShift supports PGSQL syntax and connectors now I think. That's a fully managed turn-key DB, but of course it locks you into AWS.
- mej10 10y ago
  Redshift isn't highly available (if a node goes down you have to wait for it to restore a new one, which takes hours) and only has a small subset of PostgreSQL features. It is really only intended for OLAP (analytics) processing.
- drewbug01 10y ago
  Postgres and Redshift should not be considered equivalent. It's true that Redshift originated as a fork of Postgres 8, but Postgres has come a _long_ way since then and is quite different. On top of that, Redshift is columnar database, which is an entirely different animal than vanilla Postgres (or any other DBMS). Ref: http://docs.aws.amazon.com/redshift/latest/dg/c_unsupported-postgresql-features.html http://docs.aws.amazon.com/redshift/latest/dg/c_unsupported-... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Redshift https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Redshift
- dguaraglia 10y ago
  Not meaning to be an ass, but this is really bad advice. Redshift is not supposed to be used like Postgres. Redshift is a data warehousing solution, with completely different tradeoffs, and accommodating completely different work loads than your average Postgres database. For example, you can't create indices on Redshift tables or relationships between them, the consistency story is completely different from Postgres and Redshift is optimized for bulk loads, not millions of discrete inserts/updates a second. Amazon RDS does provide hosted Postgres, and that is what you want to use if you want managed Postgres. Or you can use Herokus's hosted Postgres (it does get expensive with size, though.)
edoceo 10y ago
Yes PG 9+ have greatly improved replication. Yes AWS does it for you.
- eikenberry 10y ago
  This was with 9.x using the replication system. It was certainly better than the old wal forwarrding systems, but it still was a giant PITA.
SirPulse 10y ago
Amazon recently announced PostgreSQL support for Aurora. That should give you what you are looking for.
drdaeman 10y ago
It surely has improved (replication and failover are much easier now, than they used to be), but still not anywhere close to "just give other node's address and we're good". And that BDR thingy for master-master stuff is still an unofficial fork (although, as I get it, it's from one of main Postgres contributors, so it's really close)
jeltz 10y ago
It has improved quite a bit since then (in 9.2 or 9.3 when you last used it), but it is still not all the way there. Especially rebuilding the cluster is much easier now.
fnl 10y ago
Excellent point! My counter-argument to that would be: How many startups/SMEs embracing Rethink really need full four or five nines availability? I'd expect the costs of running that HA stuff is an order of magnitude higher than the costs of even a few days of downtime p.a.. And migrating from Postgres to something with HA once needed is probably easier than migrating to Postgres if costs are killing you.

api 10y ago

If you want a managed solution RedShift supports PGSQL syntax and connectors now I think. That's a fully managed turn-key DB, but of course it locks you into AWS.

mej10 10y ago
Redshift isn't highly available (if a node goes down you have to wait for it to restore a new one, which takes hours) and only has a small subset of PostgreSQL features. It is really only intended for OLAP (analytics) processing.
drewbug01 10y ago
Postgres and Redshift should not be considered equivalent. It's true that Redshift originated as a fork of Postgres 8, but Postgres has come a _long_ way since then and is quite different. On top of that, Redshift is columnar database, which is an entirely different animal than vanilla Postgres (or any other DBMS). Ref: http://docs.aws.amazon.com/redshift/latest/dg/c_unsupported-postgresql-features.html http://docs.aws.amazon.com/redshift/latest/dg/c_unsupported-... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Redshift https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Redshift
dguaraglia 10y ago
Not meaning to be an ass, but this is really bad advice. Redshift is not supposed to be used like Postgres. Redshift is a data warehousing solution, with completely different tradeoffs, and accommodating completely different work loads than your average Postgres database. For example, you can't create indices on Redshift tables or relationships between them, the consistency story is completely different from Postgres and Redshift is optimized for bulk loads, not millions of discrete inserts/updates a second. Amazon RDS does provide hosted Postgres, and that is what you want to use if you want managed Postgres. Or you can use Herokus's hosted Postgres (it does get expensive with size, though.)

edoceo 10y ago

Yes PG 9+ have greatly improved replication. Yes AWS does it for you.

eikenberry 10y ago
This was with 9.x using the replication system. It was certainly better than the old wal forwarrding systems, but it still was a giant PITA.

SirPulse 10y ago

Amazon recently announced PostgreSQL support for Aurora. That should give you what you are looking for.

drdaeman 10y ago

It surely has improved (replication and failover are much easier now, than they used to be), but still not anywhere close to "just give other node's address and we're good". And that BDR thingy for master-master stuff is still an unofficial fork (although, as I get it, it's from one of main Postgres contributors, so it's really close)

jeltz 10y ago

It has improved quite a bit since then (in 9.2 or 9.3 when you last used it), but it is still not all the way there. Especially rebuilding the cluster is much easier now.

fnl 10y ago

Excellent point! My counter-argument to that would be: How many startups/SMEs embracing Rethink really need full four or five nines availability? I'd expect the costs of running that HA stuff is an order of magnitude higher than the costs of even a few days of downtime p.a.. And migrating from Postgres to something with HA once needed is probably easier than migrating to Postgres if costs are killing you.