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Having just read through the slide deck, I'm having a hard time coming to the same conclusion you do. Overall, I thought it was quite balanced, pointing out str
by grzm 10y ago
Having just read through the slide deck, I'm having a hard time coming to the same conclusion you do. Overall, I thought it was quite balanced, pointing out strengths and weaknesses of both MySQL and PostgreSQL. The author even started out with a slide with Inigo Montoya, "You insulted my elephant. Prepare to die", so he was clearly cognizant of the fact that this could be taken as purely a blind defense of PostgreSQL, and that is not the intent.
Would you mind taking the time to point out what phrases or slides gave you the impression that this was written from the position that "Uber engineers had bad experiences with postgres because they are morons"? I know that different people can get different impressions of the same material, so it would be helpful for me to understand better what gave you that impression.
There are a couple of comments like:
> I assume the company the size of Uber can figure it out. C’mon
> But... c’mon. Uber?
Both of these I think reflect the idea that it's likely Uber would have been able to continue to use Postgres if they were interested in fixing the issues they had with the system, rather than had additional, other motivations for doing so, the belief being that the Postgres-specific issues they list are likely soluble if they had wanted to put in the effort. They're a large enough organization that they should have had the resources to do so.
That doesn't mean that their decision to move off of Postgres for those other reasons wasn't the right thing to do: just that there's not enough information there for us to really understand the decision process. From a Postgres community standpoint, it's important to make sure that they have quality answers to the issues publicly raised by very visible companies such as Uber. Many people will read about Uber's experience with Postgres, and it makes sense for the Postgres community to be clear what can be done about them.
Your point about "postgres is hard to use correctly" I think is one of those things that it's hard to use a lot of the systems out there—not just Postgres—at the scale that Uber or some of the other large installations do. That's when you really become aware of where the stresses put on the systems start to show and what you need to be aware of to tune and set them up correctly for your use case.
Overall, I think 'gdulli's response (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14223170 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14223170) is largely on point.
Like I said above, if you'd point out which parts struck you as particularly unfair, I know I'd benefit from it to hear more from your perspective.
- foldr 10y agoI found the use of shrug emojis in response to substantive points from the Uber paper pretty infuriating. I didn't say that postgres is difficult to use. I said that the slides give that impression.
- grzm 10y agoInteresting. I'm not a fan of emoji (or memes for that matter) in general, but I realize they're part of the tech culture now and try not to let them bother me too much. The first shrug emoji was after the 9.2 data corruption bug. I took that one to mean "Yup. What are we going to do? There was a bug, and we fixed it as quickly as we correctly could. Incredibly regrettable, but that kind of stuff is going to happen." There are bugs in software. Knowing the Postgres developer community, they take correctness very seriously. The second one is after the Uber quote which describes their tolerance for developer's holding open transactions and blocking I/O operations, which they do so from a position of inexperience because they're not database experts. I understood this one to mean "If you're going to use handle transactions in this manner, that's not something Postgres itself is going to be able to help you with." The third was in response to the Uber quote regarding Uber application bugs which resulted in open idle connections. I took this shrug to mean that if this is an issue, it likely can (and should) be fixed in the Uber applications. It's not really a Postgres issue. The fourth (and last) was in response to the lack of quantitative information regarding their Postgres issues (which makes honest, in-depth third-party investigation difficult), Uber's decision to go schema-less, and that MySQL is more tolerant of the bugs in Uber software. I took this one again to mean that there's little that Postgres itself is responsible for, or can do anything about here. A question I always like to ask myself when someone has issues with something a third party is responsible for is what is a realistic and reasonable response from the third party. That often makes me realize that there's little they can be expected to do or are really responsible for, at least for some of the issues. For the most part, I think these shrugs reflect that. If the shrug emojis were removed, would it be okay? Anything else?
- foldr 10y agoThe issue is that it's rude to quote someone and then respond with an emoji. If what they're saying is relevant then it merits a proper response. If it isn't relevant, or you don't have anything to say in response, then you shouldn't quote it in the first place. You're welcome to come up with your own theories of what the emojis mean, but I don't see any point in doing so.