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Why old-school PostgreSQL is so hip again
- joncrane 9y agoIs Postgres really perceived as "Old-School?" I mean it's at least as modern and hip as MySQL these days.
- sharms 9y agoI consider it modern, especially the great changes brought forth in 9.x and 10.x. Multi-node databases, big data partitioning, replication are all areas which are still evolving for all sorts of data stores. Postgres certainly has been around for awhile, but to say the code is old is inaccurate. Evolved might be a better way to state it.
- astrodust 9y agoAt least? 9.x removed some of the last barriers to adoption, like having a simple replication strategy, and now we're already on to 10.1. The release notes for each version on Postgres highlight dozens of important new features: https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/New_in_postgres_10 https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/New_in_postgres_10 That team is crushing it. Meanwhile MySQL has gone from 5.5 to 5.7 and added JSON columns and a bit of InnoDB tuning.
- cwyers 9y agoI think they mean in comparison to Mongo/Cassandra/etc., not other relational databases.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- dep_b 9y agoIt's the thing everybody fled to once MySQL got Oraclized. It was always a bit more superior in terms of features and reliability but once Larry Ellison appeared with his whip people really started running.
- SAI_Peregrinus 9y agoIt came out earlier than last week. Definitely "old-school" for some.
- astrodust 9y agoThree JavaScript frameworks and a dozen political scandals ago.
- dunk010 9y agoNot everyone jumped on the NoSQL bandwagon. Software development is a horrible gaping maw of fad-driven, ill-thought-out crap.
- arca_vorago 9y agoI'm so glad I started reading Michael Stonebreakers opinions on nosql before I dove into it. This is why scidb and voltdb are very intriguing to me.
- veritas3241 9y agoDo you have any recommendations on what to read? I'm curious about both of these DB's. Thanks!
- arca_vorago 9y agoSure, just a few blog posts and some other things really, but here you go. https://cacm.acm.org/blogs/blog-cacm/50678-the-nosql-discussion-has-nothing-to-do-with-sql/fulltext https://cacm.acm.org/blogs/blog-cacm/50678-the-nosql-discuss... http://www.labouseur.com/courses/db/Stonebraker-SQL-vs-NoSQL-2010.pdf http://www.labouseur.com/courses/db/Stonebraker-SQL-vs-NoSQL... http://www.redbook.io/ http://www.redbook.io/ https://www.barrons.com/articles/michael-stonebraker-describes-oracles-obsolescence-facebooks-enormous-challenge-1427744933 https://www.barrons.com/articles/michael-stonebraker-describ... https://blog.jooq.org/2013/08/24/mit-prof-michael-stonebraker-the-traditional-rdbms-wisdom-is-all-wrong/ https://blog.jooq.org/2013/08/24/mit-prof-michael-stonebrake... http://wp.sigmod.org/?p=1629 http://wp.sigmod.org/?p=1629 https://www.voltdb.com/blog/ https://www.voltdb.com/blog/ http://www.paradigm4.com/category/blog/ http://www.paradigm4.com/category/blog/
- veritas3241 9y agoOh wow! Thank you!
- whatyoucantsay 9y ago
- Sevii 9y agoPostgres fills a niche that has a lot going for it. It’s standard SQL with transactions so it’s easy to code against compared to Nosql like Cassandra. There are lots of powerful extensions like JSON and full text search. And you can scale it pretty far.
- rantanplan 9y agoA niche?
- nucleardog 9y agoIf you get deep enough into the hipster development movement (or anything) you lose sight of everything that's going on around you.
- ForHackernews 9y agoThat niche being "anyone who needs to store structured data and reliably retrieve it". It's a small market, but there's demand there.
- sidlls 9y agoPostgres is likely suitable for 90% (or more) of the crap "engineers" currently fall all over themselves to implement Kafka, Spark, and whatever other bizzword laden "big data" or "machine learning" resume driven development for. It's not a niche.
- 3pt14159 9y agoI'm still trying to find an engineer that can explain to me why they use Redis for job queuing over Postgres. Redis for HTML caching: Cool. Redis for queueing: Are you really sure you need the performance gain? Really? You can do 10k writes per second with Postgres (100k per second with COPY). If you need more than that fine, but for 99% of web apps out there it's just one more moving piece that probably doesn't get included in your backups.
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- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- wenc 9y agoThe biggest gripe I've had with Postgres (and I mention this elsewhere) is the lack of a decent GUI/IDE. But as Datagrip matures, the landscape can only get better. Datagrip is not free, but I'm willing to pay for something that works better than pgAdmin. There are some exciting things happening in the Postgres space. Outside of Citus for scaling out, TimescaleDB has a plugin that makes Postgres a strong contender in the time-series database space. Temporal joins have always been a problem with NoSQL time-series databases; otoh joins are what SQL databases have traditionally been optimized for. It'll be exciting to have a large-scale datastore where you can easily combine and recombine different time-series in a single query.
- Dirlewanger 9y agoFor OSX: Postico (https://eggerapps.at/postico/ https://eggerapps.at/postico/). You have to pay, and it's no Sequel Pro, but it's leagues better than all the garbage free ones.
- iRobbery 9y agoHmm i have been looking at this one before. Could you share some user experiences, like how often you get updates, and the start guide has a 'Connecting to a remote PostgreSQL server via SSH' section, without content yet, does tunnelling via SSH work nice/as expected?
- newmanships 9y agoNot the op but connecting through SSH works great in my experience and is very straight forward in the UI. I feel like updates are pretty frequent as well. I also love that it saves all my queries unlike psequel.
- enkrs 9y agoI can answer this, as I purchased Postico for our team just today (just out of gratitude really, as the free version is good enough) Tunnelling via SSH works great, but you do have to provide and save your ssh key password in Postico, because it does not use ssh-agent. Lots of great features and small updates here and there: it was updated with touch bar support quite quickly. A killer feature is Ctrl+P fuzzy search for table names in database. It's great for getting query data out of your db quickly or just browsing around. Ok to add the odd column here and there. However managing roles and permissions seems to be out of scope.
- greenhouse_gas 9y agoLooking back, I never understood why it didn't win the database wars in the 90's against MySQL (in the famous LAMP stack)? Was it that it was harder to administrate?
- noir_lord 9y agoMySQL had faster reads and better clustering out the box. It did a lot of questionable things to get that (mostly MyISAM, innodb is better) and it was a lot more tolerant of shoddy data modelling (again questionable).
- ForHackernews 9y agoManual vacuum used to be a pain on Postgres.
- mmsimanga 9y agoI was a part-time web developer at the time. I remember that PostgreSQL didn't run on Windows. Most hosting providers also only supported MySQL. Back then I used [Xampp](https://www.apachefriends.org/index.html https://www.apachefriends.org/index.html) to do all my development on Windows.
- wvenable 9y agoAs a developer from that time, Postgres was more fiddly and unnecessarily complex. It was probably always an objectively better DBMS (except at replication) but MySQL was simpler and more predictable. And subsequently the entire ecosystem fit together better with MySQL (the LAMP stack as you mentioned).
- takeda 9y agoFrom my perspective it was due to PHP being really popular back then, and MySQL was a first class citizen there. Then Python showed up, which reversed it (Postgres is defacto standard database for it). Acquisition of MySQL by Oracle sped up this change further.
- smacktoward 9y agoPostgres focused on being accurate. MySQL focused on being fast. It turned out people cared a lot more about being fast than about being accurate.
- selimnairb 9y agoIs it possible that a rise in geospatial applications is partly a driver of Postgres’s rise in popularity? PostGIS seems to be the best option for storing geospatial data in an RDBMS (open source or otherwise).
- cname 9y agoAnecdotal, but PostGIS is the reason I started using Postgres several years ago in some of my own projects, which later came in handy at different jobs. At one place, we standardized on Postgres partly because of PostGIS. I think Django has had some influence too, since they've always recommended Postgres.
- Boothroid 9y agoI selected PostgreSQL for a geo project recently. Still haven't got my head around tuning, but apart from that I've found it great to use. I use psycopg2 to connect from Python. No nasty surprises in use, and found that all my pidgin SQL translated easily. Also worth knowing that ogr2ogr supports PostgreSQL and is an awesome tool.
- teddyh 9y agoI wish WordPress would support it. It would make it easier for me to suggest PostgreSQL for people with simple web hosting needs.