8 ms·

With Postgres you don't need MongoDB, InfluxDB, or any other trendy thing, Postgres does it all, and better than all the wannabes.

by gaius 8y ago

sz4kerto 8y ago
Is that really true? Postgres is great, but it doesn't cater for _all_ use cases. For example, horizontal scalability is -- understandably for an ACID RDBMS -- not as trivial as it is for some document stores.
- gaius 8y ago
  Check out what Citus are doing with PG https://www.citusdata.com https://www.citusdata.com
  - threeseed 8y ago
    That's a fork of PostgreSQL. So it doesn't help you when it comes to using cloud hosted services e.g. AWS or Azure. It's also a commercial product that isn't exactly cheap ($890/node).
    - stareatgoats 8y ago
      It's not a fork (according to their promotion), it's an 'extension', but not sure I can explain the difference. Their solution looks interesting but pricing wasn't very visible on their website, what you quote is prohibitive for me (where does it say?). But I at least assumed the 'open source' would be free.
      - threeseed 8y ago
        Pricing is available here: https://www.citusdata.com/pricing https://www.citusdata.com/pricing And the point still stands that this isn't core PostgreSQL. So you can't use managed services like AWS RDS with this. And you're reliant entirely on the vendor for support. So from the user perspective it is basically a fork.
        stareatgoats 8y ago
        OK thanks for this. The product seems promising even if it is not core PG. I'd have to dive into the deep end and test drive to check if the trade-offs would be worthwhile. The 'open source version' seems free, so I guess I could at some point.
        manigandham 8y ago
        PostgreSQL is completely open-source with no backing company so everyone is reliant on some vendor if they want support. It makes no difference that Citus is one of them, with some core PG devs onboard. Why would you talk about AWS RDS and then skip over Citus Cloud which is a managed service? If you consider this a fork then any plugin for PG is also a fork, which then makes it hard to have a productive discussion.
        threeseed 8y ago
        The reason I am talking about AWS RDS is because most companies aren't multi-cloud. Data needs to be housed and secured within that private VPC. And so Citus Cloud is irrelevant because it is an externally housed product. If Citus allowed their proprietary product to be run within existing clouds that could be something but it isn't. And again since it is a significant add-on i.e. beyond just a simple plugin that almost demands vendor support it is effectively a fork.
        manigandham 8y ago
        What does RDS have to do with being multi-cloud? It's a hosted offering which only works in AWS. And Citus Cloud does offer VPC connectivity so you can access it privately. As stated before, the extension is also open-source and you can run it in any cloud or datacenter yourself, for free. Why would you claim that's not allowed? You seem to be stuck on a strange intrepretation of vendor support when PG has no backing vendor, so you can pick whichever one you want. If you aren't comfortable with Citus and prefer AWS then that's fine, but you make the trade-off in the features as well. Not every managed postgres service chooses to support every PG extension so it's nothing unique in that regard, and is ultimately no different than the choices involved in picking any other database with vendor backing. You've posted several comments now that seem to show that you do not know much about Citus or are willingly misleading people about it. I'm not sure why but perhaps it would be better if you read up on the details or disclosed your angle more clearly.
      - manigandham 8y ago
        An extension means you're just running normal Postgres and load this on top. All of the normal features of Postgres are available and you can upgrade that as new versions are released without waiting for some other vendor to update their own specialized version of it. And yes, Citus is open-source and free for you to run yourself.
    - mslot 8y ago
      Citus is an open source plug-in that you load into vanilla PostgreSQL, similar to PostGIS and other extensions.
Avamander 8y ago
Could you please elaborate how to use Postgres as a time series database (like InfluxDB)?
- scrollaway 8y ago
  The TimescaleDB plugin is extremely promising: https://www.timescale.com/ https://www.timescale.com/ Natively without a plugin, it's not possible though.
- gaius 8y ago
  Could you please elaborate how to use Postgres as a time series database (like InfluxDB)? There's some good discussion of it here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16539317 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16539317
- StreamBright 8y ago
  Create a table and have a timestamp for your data? Not sure what you are asking. On hand we have: 15+ years old mature product that is widely supported and it can be used as a time series database Other hand: n+1 young database engine with all of the problems that any young data storage engine has (only exception is FoundationDB because those guys actually understood the challenges of writing a reliable data store) The question is, what can InfluxDB offer over Postgres for storing time series data?
  - threeseed 8y ago
    Well InfluxDB actually is a time series database. That's all it does. The query language is optimised for time based queries. The storage is optimised for time series. It is part of the metrics/monitoring ecosystem so it has integrations with tools like Grafana. PostgreSQL doesn't have any time series capabilities OOTB. It's just people modelling the concept in a relational fashion. No different to how Excel can be used as a time series database. And seriously everyone should just get over FoundationDB. There are plenty of people who have invented new databases that got it right e.g. Cassandra, HBase, Redis etc.
    - 8y ago
threeseed 8y ago
This is simply untrue. MongoDB is a much better JSON store. It's ridiculously faster, has much richer update semantics and it's simply not comparable when it comes to the ease of clustering. As for time series unless I am confused but PostgreSQL doesn't have any OOTB capabilities.
- gaius 8y ago
  MongoDB is a much better JSON store That hasn't been true for a long time, if it even ever really was when you consider that the key role of a database is to reliably persist your data https://www.enterprisedb.com/node/3441 https://www.enterprisedb.com/node/3441 (2014)
  - threeseed 8y ago
    Think about this for a second. You just posted a link that is over 4 years old. It's completely irrelevant. Especially since I am referring to version 3.0+ where they completely replaced their entire engine with WiredTiger. And from that point on the performance for tuple level updates for example is faster than I've seen from ANY database. And this nonsense about reliable persistence of data was a case of bad defaults many, many years ago. It was also fixed many, many years ago and so these tired memes just make you look bad.
    - gaius 8y ago
      You just posted a link that is over 4 years old. Yes, to make my point that it hasn't been true "for a long time". Yes Mongo had JSON support before PG did, but PG soon surpassed it. these tired memes just make you look bad Nah, they make me look like what I am, an extremely experienced data guy. Maybe Mongo has some use cases in webdev, I wouldn't know.

With Postgres you don't need MongoDB, InfluxDB, or any other trendy thing, Postgres does it all, and better than all the wannabes.

by gaius 8y ago

With Postgres you don't need MongoDB, InfluxDB, or any other trendy thing, Postgres does it all, and better than all the wannabes.

sz4kerto 8y ago

Is that really true? Postgres is great, but it doesn't cater for _all_ use cases. For example, horizontal scalability is -- understandably for an ACID RDBMS -- not as trivial as it is for some document stores.

gaius 8y ago
Check out what Citus are doing with PG https://www.citusdata.com https://www.citusdata.com
- threeseed 8y ago
  That's a fork of PostgreSQL. So it doesn't help you when it comes to using cloud hosted services e.g. AWS or Azure. It's also a commercial product that isn't exactly cheap ($890/node).
  - stareatgoats 8y ago
    It's not a fork (according to their promotion), it's an 'extension', but not sure I can explain the difference. Their solution looks interesting but pricing wasn't very visible on their website, what you quote is prohibitive for me (where does it say?). But I at least assumed the 'open source' would be free.
    - threeseed 8y ago
      Pricing is available here: https://www.citusdata.com/pricing https://www.citusdata.com/pricing And the point still stands that this isn't core PostgreSQL. So you can't use managed services like AWS RDS with this. And you're reliant entirely on the vendor for support. So from the user perspective it is basically a fork.
      - stareatgoats 8y ago
        OK thanks for this. The product seems promising even if it is not core PG. I'd have to dive into the deep end and test drive to check if the trade-offs would be worthwhile. The 'open source version' seems free, so I guess I could at some point.
      - manigandham 8y ago
        PostgreSQL is completely open-source with no backing company so everyone is reliant on some vendor if they want support. It makes no difference that Citus is one of them, with some core PG devs onboard. Why would you talk about AWS RDS and then skip over Citus Cloud which is a managed service? If you consider this a fork then any plugin for PG is also a fork, which then makes it hard to have a productive discussion.
        threeseed 8y ago
        The reason I am talking about AWS RDS is because most companies aren't multi-cloud. Data needs to be housed and secured within that private VPC. And so Citus Cloud is irrelevant because it is an externally housed product. If Citus allowed their proprietary product to be run within existing clouds that could be something but it isn't. And again since it is a significant add-on i.e. beyond just a simple plugin that almost demands vendor support it is effectively a fork.
        manigandham 8y ago
        What does RDS have to do with being multi-cloud? It's a hosted offering which only works in AWS. And Citus Cloud does offer VPC connectivity so you can access it privately. As stated before, the extension is also open-source and you can run it in any cloud or datacenter yourself, for free. Why would you claim that's not allowed? You seem to be stuck on a strange intrepretation of vendor support when PG has no backing vendor, so you can pick whichever one you want. If you aren't comfortable with Citus and prefer AWS then that's fine, but you make the trade-off in the features as well. Not every managed postgres service chooses to support every PG extension so it's nothing unique in that regard, and is ultimately no different than the choices involved in picking any other database with vendor backing. You've posted several comments now that seem to show that you do not know much about Citus or are willingly misleading people about it. I'm not sure why but perhaps it would be better if you read up on the details or disclosed your angle more clearly.
    - manigandham 8y ago
      An extension means you're just running normal Postgres and load this on top. All of the normal features of Postgres are available and you can upgrade that as new versions are released without waiting for some other vendor to update their own specialized version of it. And yes, Citus is open-source and free for you to run yourself.
  - mslot 8y ago
    Citus is an open source plug-in that you load into vanilla PostgreSQL, similar to PostGIS and other extensions.

Avamander 8y ago

Could you please elaborate how to use Postgres as a time series database (like InfluxDB)?

scrollaway 8y ago
The TimescaleDB plugin is extremely promising: https://www.timescale.com/ https://www.timescale.com/ Natively without a plugin, it's not possible though.
gaius 8y ago
Could you please elaborate how to use Postgres as a time series database (like InfluxDB)? There's some good discussion of it here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16539317 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16539317
StreamBright 8y ago
Create a table and have a timestamp for your data? Not sure what you are asking. On hand we have: 15+ years old mature product that is widely supported and it can be used as a time series database Other hand: n+1 young database engine with all of the problems that any young data storage engine has (only exception is FoundationDB because those guys actually understood the challenges of writing a reliable data store) The question is, what can InfluxDB offer over Postgres for storing time series data?
- threeseed 8y ago
  Well InfluxDB actually is a time series database. That's all it does. The query language is optimised for time based queries. The storage is optimised for time series. It is part of the metrics/monitoring ecosystem so it has integrations with tools like Grafana. PostgreSQL doesn't have any time series capabilities OOTB. It's just people modelling the concept in a relational fashion. No different to how Excel can be used as a time series database. And seriously everyone should just get over FoundationDB. There are plenty of people who have invented new databases that got it right e.g. Cassandra, HBase, Redis etc.
  - 8y ago

threeseed 8y ago

This is simply untrue. MongoDB is a much better JSON store. It's ridiculously faster, has much richer update semantics and it's simply not comparable when it comes to the ease of clustering. As for time series unless I am confused but PostgreSQL doesn't have any OOTB capabilities.

gaius 8y ago
MongoDB is a much better JSON store That hasn't been true for a long time, if it even ever really was when you consider that the key role of a database is to reliably persist your data https://www.enterprisedb.com/node/3441 https://www.enterprisedb.com/node/3441 (2014)
- threeseed 8y ago
  Think about this for a second. You just posted a link that is over 4 years old. It's completely irrelevant. Especially since I am referring to version 3.0+ where they completely replaced their entire engine with WiredTiger. And from that point on the performance for tuple level updates for example is faster than I've seen from ANY database. And this nonsense about reliable persistence of data was a case of bad defaults many, many years ago. It was also fixed many, many years ago and so these tired memes just make you look bad.
  - gaius 8y ago
    You just posted a link that is over 4 years old. Yes, to make my point that it hasn't been true "for a long time". Yes Mongo had JSON support before PG did, but PG soon surpassed it. these tired memes just make you look bad Nah, they make me look like what I am, an extremely experienced data guy. Maybe Mongo has some use cases in webdev, I wouldn't know.