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Having been in or associated with many database startups, I would not invest in one. You need to evangelize a product on which the life of someone’s project or

Having been in or associated with many database startups, I would not invest in one. You need to evangelize a product on which the life of someone’s project or company depends. in such a situation, you want boring technology that just works. Hard to imagine a new feature, or performance win, that justifies the vastly increased risk of obtaining it.

mnahkies 5y ago
I'm not sure I agree with this - there have been many postgres features over the past ~10 years that got me excited, some of the highlights that immediately spring to mind: - JSON / jsonb - improved partitioning support - identity columns I agree that I wouldn't want to trust a new entrant to the space unless it was subject to rigorous testing, eg https://jepsen.io/ https://jepsen.io/
- Nextgrid 5y ago
  > postgres Postgres has the advantage that it's still open-source, can be ran locally and self-hosted (and has a healthy ecosystem of managed providers) and won't go away anytime soon. None of these are true for all these new DB startups.
- geophile 5y ago
  Doing well on the Jepsen tests is a very good sign. But it isn't anywhere near enough. Other things to consider: - The product has bugs not addressed by Jepsen. - Performance is inadequate. - The optimizer is immature, and you find yourself struggling to understand and work around its limitations. - Replication is missing or doesn't work well enough. - There is absolutely no substitute for N years of real-world experience, no matter how rigorous the company's testing. - Impossibility of finding people already familiar with the product, because they are all employed by the vendor. - Even aside from product issues, is the company profitable? If not, how long is it going to be in existence?
  - redis_mlc 5y ago
KronisLV 5y ago
> You need to evangelize a product on which the life of someone’s project or company depends. I've actually seen the results of a database product being picked, the company behind which ceased to exist. It wasn't pretty, since at one point the product ceased to be supported and therefore neither any updates/fixes were made, it wasn't available in the repositories for new OS distros and eventually even the documentation for it went offline. Having to support a system that integrated with it was an unpleasant experience, all the way to it being eventually replaced with something else instead. Therefore, it probably makes a lot of sense to base something as critical as your data storage layer on proven technologies that have demonstrated that they'll probably be supported in one form or another for the following years or even decades, unless you have a good reason for choosing something else. Those reasons might deal with particular workloads or requirements, e.g. clustering solutions for PostgreSQL/MySQL/MariaDB/..., geospatial extensions, solutions to integrate with it through REST interfaces or even GraphQL or something like that, with a stable and proven piece of software still at the core of it all. In case anyone is wondering, the product in question was Clusterpoint, about which you can read a bit more here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clusterpoint https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clusterpoint a NoSQL database that actually predates MongoDB by a few years, as far as i know. Of course, now it seems like even their homepage is offline.
- jd_mongodb 5y ago
  MongoDB 1.0 was released in 2009. ClusterPoint seems to have launched several years later. https://www.mongodb.com/blog/post/10-ga-released https://www.mongodb.com/blog/post/10-ga-released. MongoDB the company was founded in 2007.
  - KronisLV 5y ago
    Clusterpoint: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clusterpoint https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clusterpoint > Clusterpoint Ltd. > Founded 2006 > Clusterpoint Database > Initial release 2006 > Stable release 2015 MongoDB: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MongoDB https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MongoDB > MongoDB, Inc. (formerly 10gen, Inc.) > Founded 2007 > MongoDB > Initial release 2009 > Stable release 2021 Then again, maybe Clusterpoint's Wikipedia page is lying, i don't really care much about it anymore.

mnahkies 5y ago

I'm not sure I agree with this - there have been many postgres features over the past ~10 years that got me excited, some of the highlights that immediately spring to mind: - JSON / jsonb - improved partitioning support - identity columns I agree that I wouldn't want to trust a new entrant to the space unless it was subject to rigorous testing, eg https://jepsen.io/ https://jepsen.io/

Nextgrid 5y ago
> postgres Postgres has the advantage that it's still open-source, can be ran locally and self-hosted (and has a healthy ecosystem of managed providers) and won't go away anytime soon. None of these are true for all these new DB startups.
geophile 5y ago
Doing well on the Jepsen tests is a very good sign. But it isn't anywhere near enough. Other things to consider: - The product has bugs not addressed by Jepsen. - Performance is inadequate. - The optimizer is immature, and you find yourself struggling to understand and work around its limitations. - Replication is missing or doesn't work well enough. - There is absolutely no substitute for N years of real-world experience, no matter how rigorous the company's testing. - Impossibility of finding people already familiar with the product, because they are all employed by the vendor. - Even aside from product issues, is the company profitable? If not, how long is it going to be in existence?
- redis_mlc 5y ago

KronisLV 5y ago

> You need to evangelize a product on which the life of someone’s project or company depends. I've actually seen the results of a database product being picked, the company behind which ceased to exist. It wasn't pretty, since at one point the product ceased to be supported and therefore neither any updates/fixes were made, it wasn't available in the repositories for new OS distros and eventually even the documentation for it went offline. Having to support a system that integrated with it was an unpleasant experience, all the way to it being eventually replaced with something else instead. Therefore, it probably makes a lot of sense to base something as critical as your data storage layer on proven technologies that have demonstrated that they'll probably be supported in one form or another for the following years or even decades, unless you have a good reason for choosing something else. Those reasons might deal with particular workloads or requirements, e.g. clustering solutions for PostgreSQL/MySQL/MariaDB/..., geospatial extensions, solutions to integrate with it through REST interfaces or even GraphQL or something like that, with a stable and proven piece of software still at the core of it all. In case anyone is wondering, the product in question was Clusterpoint, about which you can read a bit more here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clusterpoint https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clusterpoint a NoSQL database that actually predates MongoDB by a few years, as far as i know. Of course, now it seems like even their homepage is offline.

jd_mongodb 5y ago
MongoDB 1.0 was released in 2009. ClusterPoint seems to have launched several years later. https://www.mongodb.com/blog/post/10-ga-released https://www.mongodb.com/blog/post/10-ga-released. MongoDB the company was founded in 2007.
- KronisLV 5y ago
  Clusterpoint: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clusterpoint https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clusterpoint > Clusterpoint Ltd. > Founded 2006 > Clusterpoint Database > Initial release 2006 > Stable release 2015 MongoDB: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MongoDB https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MongoDB > MongoDB, Inc. (formerly 10gen, Inc.) > Founded 2007 > MongoDB > Initial release 2009 > Stable release 2021 Then again, maybe Clusterpoint's Wikipedia page is lying, i don't really care much about it anymore.