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I am not calling Postgres hype - it should have never been NOT hype. It's a reasonable default for most problems, Now all I read about is how Postgres is aweso

• rendall 3y ago
  ...and, continuing the cycle next season, devs will (re)discover NoSQL and document DBMS. I do wonder if this phenomenon of trendy tech is somehow integral to advancing the state of the industry, the SWE equivalent of early adopters. "Rediscovering the old" is a side effect, as old tech is used and reinterpreted in new ways. Kind of neat, really.
  • Retric 3y ago
    There’s an entire industry of people selling knowledge of the “next great thing/the one true way," but they need a new thing every few years as people learned whatever the old thing was.
• arp242 3y ago
  I remember Robert C. Martin ("Uncle Bob") going on about how No-SQL will replace literally all SQL and that there is literally not a single use case for relational data and SQL. I wonder if he ever came back on that. Now, my opinion of Martin in general is not especially high and he's a bit of a controversial figure, but it wasn't just the kids. And Martin is also all about reliable software, so that makes it even more surprising.
  • rjbwork 3y ago
    He's always been fundamentally a salesman. Hopping on the hype trains lets him sell more.
    • pydry 3y ago
      He's always been fundamentally a zealot who sees most narratives in black and white terms. It's an extremely unfortunate characteristic of a software engineer. It's the same reason he's so pro Trump I think.
      • wesselbindt 3y ago
        The reason he says he voted for Trump is taxes. But that seems like a pretty flimsy reason. Have dems in the past couple decades ever reverted any republican-instated tax cuts for the wealthy/corporations, or even made any moves for tax bumps? In my experience dems are just republicans, except they wave a rainbow flag every now and then.
      • arp242 3y ago
        I didn't even know about that; I checked his Twitter, and first thing is a reply to the Baltimore bridge collapse: > Doors and wheels fall off airplanes. Hundreds of illegal immigrants assault and overrun border guards in Texas. We can’t even muster support for our allies in the security council. But at least our pronouns are in order. https://twitter.com/unclebobmartin/status/1772628692956545530 https://twitter.com/unclebobmartin/status/177262869295654553... You really need to be a special sort of individual to go from a collapsed bridge to ranting about pronouns with no prompting or any prior mention of that. What a complete spanner.
        • forgotmyinfo 3y ago
          That happened to esr, too, although he derailed right after 9/11, and it's been downhill ever since.
        • zo1 3y ago
          From the other side, people like me, see your odd dismissive behaviour in the same light. This bridge and hundreds of other things going wrong throughout the world atm are all symptoms of some sort of rotten problem, and I honestly don't know why you guys are so adamant about dismissing it. Almost as if you want to see it all come crashing down. Pure evil, as Trump would call it.
  • belter 3y ago
    I also remember Michael Stonebraker basically saying something, but being ignored...Along the lines of "I will see you all map reduce and nosql people in 20 years, after you have all reinvented SQL...." Not an actual quote but a factual statement
    • jimbokun 3y ago
      Because he realized you can parse SQL and generate the equivalent of a map reduce job on the backend to execute it.
  • GiorgioG 3y ago
    Unpopular opinion, Robert C Martin has caused more harm than good. People take his ideas and blindly follow them no matter the cost. I’m looking at you clean architecture.
    • forgotmyinfo 3y ago
      Well yeah, solving problems and thinking critically and learning are hard and boring. "Uncle Bob" gives you handy alhorisms you can spam on your next pull request and then feel like you've done something.
    • arcbyte 3y ago
      There's definitely a missing piece he hasn't explained well enough. I've seen the best code in the world because it was clean architecture and I've also seen some truly atrocious code in the style of "clean architecture". To me the difference was in recognizing that the architecture advice is implicit - its not actually written down in the code, rather the code exemplifies it - and the business domain is explicitly modeled. When developers name everything "use case" and "interactor" and go crazy with packages and folder structures with architectural names it's a recipe for terribleness.
  • Shorel 3y ago
    His words: "I am also self-taught. I never got a degree of any kind. I entered the industry at the tender age of 17 and never looked back. Frankly, school isn’t all it’s cracked up to be — especially in the software field." https://twitter.com/unclebobmartin/status/1072125758548688896?lang=en https://twitter.com/unclebobmartin/status/107212575854868889... Which means his opinions are more often than not uninformed opinions and should be taken with a grain of salt.
    • fijiaarone 3y ago
      When you turn 23 in a couple years, you’ll look back at college and realize you weren’t at the apex of all knowledge back then.
    • sph 3y ago
      I think you overestimate college education a little too much. Having a degree doesn't make your opinions automatically better than those that didn't have the chance to get one. You wish it did, but it don't.
      • Shorel 3y ago
        My remark is not about the quality of college education. It's about his mindset. You don't need a college education to read research articles, books and journals. But you certainly need an open mind and some discipline to not try to reinvent the wheel all the time. You need to learn about the state of the art in your field. Some ideas and algorithms are proven and battle tested, and people should learn about them, before trying to create something new and claim it is much better than the old thing. This is very noticeable in some fields like cryptography. His modus operandi certainly seems to be on the other extreme, everything old is bad and the new thing around the corner is going to change everything. Which causes a lot of people who believe him to collectively waste millions of hours of their time. About your comments on the degree... it really depends on how you got it. For most people, I would agree with you. A small group of people in academia are insanely smart and are focused on research.
  • forgotmyinfo 3y ago
    That's as ridiculous as saying "integer division will be useless in 20 years". Sometimes relational databases really are the optimal solution to certain problems. I really wish CS had better authority figures, although we shouldn't need them in the first place.
• sph 3y ago
  Excited, vocal users make the most noise. Somehow the entire Mongo DB era passed me through and I never used it once. I used to use MySQL in the 2000s, and switched to PostgreSQL in the 2010s.
  • benterix 3y ago
    You haven't missed much TBH. I think the only case where you'd use it in new projects in DynamoDB if you work with AWS.
    • finikytou 3y ago
      Dynamo is not mongo?
      • benterix 3y ago
        No, DocumentDB is Mongo. What I understand the OP parent referred to is the NoSQL hype era, not just Mongo which was probably the most popular one at that time.
  • LtWorf 3y ago
    They used it at my 1st job, a startup. They had an ORM which made everything much slower, and the most common operation they did was to add items into lists, which causes the whole document to be resized and requires it to be moved. It could have been done with 1 sql server, but we needed 4 really heavy mongodb servers instead. And of course our code was buggy so the schema was all over the place.
  • jimbokun 3y ago
    My company considered it, but went with Cassandra instead.
• tomnipotent 3y ago
  Postgres as we know it has only existed for about a decade, since the post-9.x era in 2010-2014 when many of its lauded features were added. Replication, heap-only tuples, extensions, foreign data wrappers, JSON, leveraging multiple indexes, parallel index scans, reindex concurrently, JIT compilation, declarative partitioning, stored procedures, and major WAL improvements are all "recent". I love Postgres and it's been my go-to default since 2014 and you can pry it from my cold dead hands, but it's more contemporary with Perl 6 than Perl 5 if we're talking grey beards.
  • Sesse__ 3y ago
    Extensions and stored procedures are not; they've been around for longer. I do not actually use any of the others you listed (well, occasionally bitmap index scans, but it's not a killer). The main difference between 8.x and 15.x for me is the small stream of optimizer features and tweaks (e.g. at some point, it started being able to reorder outer joins).
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    • tomnipotent 3y ago
      Postgres 8 supported functions capable of returning tuples (RETURN QUERY), but lacked transaction control and other features that CREATE PROCEDURE added in Postgres 11 (2018). Extensions in Postgres 8 (and earlier) were also half-baked compared to 9.1 (2011), which added CREATE EXTENSION and other quality-of-life improvements including standardization. The latest complete implementations are what most people have in mind when talking about them.
      • Sesse__ 3y ago
        Sure, there are improvements, but it's not like Postgres was a radically different beast back then. Would I pick Postgres 15 over Postgres 8? Yes, any day of the week. But I would also readily pick Postgres 8 over most of today's databases (including e.g. the latest MySQL and MongoDB versions), for most projects, if that was the choice I had.
• benterix 3y ago
  > For grey beards, it's all very odd. Like, "where have you all been?" To be frank, PostgreSQL has evolved a lot since the late nineties. There was a time where people preferred MySQL over it at it seemed to work faster, certain things were easier and so on.
  • hibikir 3y ago
    I used postgres in the 90s. The biggest complaint was that postgres's default config needed a change so you could connect to it remotely, as the default, wisely at the time, decided that allowing connections from any IP by default before you changed any security setting whatsoever was a real problem. The MySQL performance advantages were large, with the small caveat that it was fast as long as you were using MyISAM, which achieved its speed by throwing away many safety features, like working transactions and foreign key constraints. Unsurprisingly, when eventually it got an engine that didn't throw caution to the wind, the performance advantage went away. I spent a lot of time in the early 2000s showing people whose that many of the issues they were facing with their e-commerce websites were ultimately down to the MySQL engine they had picked. But it's faster! Yes it is, but now your application code has to deal with all the things the engine has now offloaded to your application code. It's not that Postgres' changes were key to increasing market share, but that as MySQL matured, it had no options but to lose its 'advantages'.
    • kstrauser 3y ago
      That mirrors my experience. MySQL was faster for use cases where data loss was acceptable. Will anyone die if you lose some web log analysis stats? Probably not. You wouldn’t want to use it for anything where guaranteed consistency was critical, like anything involving money, but it was an alright replacement for things like an in-memory data store. I say “was”. I hear it’s vastly better now.
      • gkbrk 3y ago
        If you want a fast DB for web log analysis, you shouldn't look at MySQL or PostgreSQL anyway. ClickHouse will run circles around both of them for the use case of web log analysis.
• forgotmyinfo 3y ago
  This is what happens when you hire 20-somethings who don't know how computers actually work to build your entire business. You either learn about relational databases in school, or through experience. Relational algebra has been around for half a century, at least. If someone doesn't know about its utility, it's a failure of the education system, or a failure of corporate incentives.