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"PostgreSQL as a company would have been doomed a long time ago" PG has astonishing feature throughput. With each yearly release, they add 1-3 wow features, 6-

"PostgreSQL as a company would have been doomed a long time ago" PG has astonishing feature throughput. With each yearly release, they add 1-3 wow features, 6-10 major features, and countless smaller features still worthy of the release notes. That's really, really impressive for any database, commercial or otherwise. There's a perception that postgres is slow to add features because sometimes the feature latency is high. The reason for that is they build a solid foundation first, and slowly build multiple major features on top of that foundation. Consider replication: 1. Write ahead log (WAL) 2. WAL archiving 3. Warm standby 4. Hot standby + Streaming replication 5. Synchronous replication 6. Logical decoding of WAL 7. Logical replication That's a lot of engineering work there, but they delivered value to users at each stage along the way. And during this time, they did a ton of other stuff -- did you notice that we got parallel query along the way? And logical table partitioning came along too, which means the parallel query can now do partition-wise parallel joins. Not to mention all of the SQL features and tons and tons of other stuff. Postgres has kept the lights on for a lot of companies for a long time. I absolutely reject the idea that good engineering is at odds with business success.

chipotle_coyote 9y ago
Postgres has kept the lights on for a lot of companies for a long time. I absolutely reject the idea that good engineering is at odds with business success. I don't think they're at odds, per se, but having been around through the original dotcom bubble, PostgreSQL (or "Postgres95," as I'm pretty sure it was still called when I was introduced to it!) was mostly known to, well, database nerds for at least the first decade of its life. One person's "solid foundation" is another person's "technically correct but practically crawling" -- a perception that, rightly or wrongly, PostgreSQL fought against for a very long time. And I think that's what OP was trying to get at: if PostgreSQL was being developed primarily by a single VC-funded company, they just might not have had the luxury to spend years building that solid foundation. (I'll allow that as an ex-RethinkDBer, I may have some bias here: I loved many things about the product and especially about the product, but it's hard not to suspect we should have focused on speed and, y'know, revenue earlier than we did.)
- jeffdavis 9y ago
  VC-backed startups are not the entire business world. Some businesses don't consider correctness a "technicality".
  - user5994461 9y ago
    And those have been using Oracle, or Sybase or IBM for 3 decades.
kureikain 9y ago
MongoDB supports 1) 2) 6) 7). Not sure what 3 and 4 is, but you can just add a new node and new data will be copied over, no need to restore data from snapshot, but you can restore from snapshot too, it shorten the time the replice become available. Not sure what you mean by 5) though. Anyway, replciation is strong point of MongoDB with oplog and I don't think Postgres can beat it.

chipotle_coyote 9y ago

Postgres has kept the lights on for a lot of companies for a long time. I absolutely reject the idea that good engineering is at odds with business success. I don't think they're at odds, per se, but having been around through the original dotcom bubble, PostgreSQL (or "Postgres95," as I'm pretty sure it was still called when I was introduced to it!) was mostly known to, well, database nerds for at least the first decade of its life. One person's "solid foundation" is another person's "technically correct but practically crawling" -- a perception that, rightly or wrongly, PostgreSQL fought against for a very long time. And I think that's what OP was trying to get at: if PostgreSQL was being developed primarily by a single VC-funded company, they just might not have had the luxury to spend years building that solid foundation. (I'll allow that as an ex-RethinkDBer, I may have some bias here: I loved many things about the product and especially about the product, but it's hard not to suspect we should have focused on speed and, y'know, revenue earlier than we did.)

jeffdavis 9y ago
VC-backed startups are not the entire business world. Some businesses don't consider correctness a "technicality".
- user5994461 9y ago
  And those have been using Oracle, or Sybase or IBM for 3 decades.

kureikain 9y ago

MongoDB supports 1) 2) 6) 7). Not sure what 3 and 4 is, but you can just add a new node and new data will be copied over, no need to restore data from snapshot, but you can restore from snapshot too, it shorten the time the replice become available. Not sure what you mean by 5) though. Anyway, replciation is strong point of MongoDB with oplog and I don't think Postgres can beat it.