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I really enjoy old, stable tools that are maintained and made incrementally better, day by day. Postgres is one example, Elixir is another (which doesn't re-inv

I really enjoy old, stable tools that are maintained and made incrementally better, day by day. Postgres is one example, Elixir is another (which doesn't re-invent the Erlang VM, but builds on top of it). I also really like hosted cloud services, but they need to be replaceable with little to no effort. For instance, I don't want a new NoSQL platform, I want high-availability, managed, on-the-fly-scalable Postgres.

abraae 8y ago
Unfashionable I know but I feel strongly like this about Java. We chose Java maybe 2 decades ago when it was newly minted. Some decent swathes of code written back then are still running in production. Its enormously satisfying looking at anything in your stack which has really stood the test of time. I harbour similar feelings about the Oracle DB but I'm a little more conflicted there.
mmt 8y ago
> need to be replaceable with little to no effort. For instance, I don't want a new NoSQL platform, I want high-availability, managed, on-the-fly-scalable Postgres. I don't think the latter is easily replaceable, though, either, since what you've described isn't Postgres, but, at best, something custom with a Postgres interface. For example, the Citus DBaaS offering may fit the bill, but what could easily replace it? A self-hosted version would fail at being "managed" (though this is a bit academic, since, presumably one would hire for that) and at being on-the-fly-scalable [1]. Is Amazon RDS a drop-in replacement, or does it have compatibility and performance edge case caveats? [1] I read that sort of "wish" often and have always found it borderline naive. That is, what I think they really mean is they just don't want to worry about scalability. The dominance of expensive, few-sizes-fits-all cloud infrastructure means that custom building an over-engineered database server, is not a practical option, and for most cases, neither short-notice scalability beyond that, nor runaway growth are a realistic problem.

abraae 8y ago

Unfashionable I know but I feel strongly like this about Java. We chose Java maybe 2 decades ago when it was newly minted. Some decent swathes of code written back then are still running in production. Its enormously satisfying looking at anything in your stack which has really stood the test of time. I harbour similar feelings about the Oracle DB but I'm a little more conflicted there.

mmt 8y ago

> need to be replaceable with little to no effort. For instance, I don't want a new NoSQL platform, I want high-availability, managed, on-the-fly-scalable Postgres. I don't think the latter is easily replaceable, though, either, since what you've described isn't Postgres, but, at best, something custom with a Postgres interface. For example, the Citus DBaaS offering may fit the bill, but what could easily replace it? A self-hosted version would fail at being "managed" (though this is a bit academic, since, presumably one would hire for that) and at being on-the-fly-scalable [1]. Is Amazon RDS a drop-in replacement, or does it have compatibility and performance edge case caveats? [1] I read that sort of "wish" often and have always found it borderline naive. That is, what I think they really mean is they just don't want to worry about scalability. The dominance of expensive, few-sizes-fits-all cloud infrastructure means that custom building an over-engineered database server, is not a practical option, and for most cases, neither short-notice scalability beyond that, nor runaway growth are a realistic problem.