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Is anyone working on replacing postgres? Feels like it might be very useful since a lot of new technologies came out since spinning disks.

erpellan 1y ago
If you look at the changes that have been made to Postgres, and continue to be made, the answer is yes. The Postgres team is working on replacing Postgres. With even better Postgres.
- bddicken 1y ago
  The Postgres team incorporating io_uring into PG 18 is a good example of this: https://pganalyze.com/blog/postgres-18-async-io https://pganalyze.com/blog/postgres-18-async-io.
- zozbot234 1y ago
  inb4 "It's the best Postgres we've ever made!"
eatonphil 1y ago
Who isn't? Cockroach rewrote Postgres in Go. CedarDB rewrote Postgres in C++. And then to lesser degrees you've got Yugabyte, AlloyDB, and Aurora DSQL (and certainly more I'm forgetting) that only replace parts of Postgres.
- vladich 1y ago
  Both Cockroach and CedarDB didn't rewrite anything, they built stuff from scratch. Just used the same client protocol. There are a bunch of other unrelated databases using Postgres protocol btw.
  - eatonphil 1y ago
    I'm not talking about speaking the protocol. I'm talking about trying as hard as they can to be as indistinguishable from Postgres (to a non-operations user) as they can. And that list is very small.
gethly 1y ago
> Feels like it might be very useful since a lot of new technologies came out since spinning disks. The MVCC that Postgres uses(and no one else) is like 50yo outdated concept they still cling to. So just by virtue of that, it makes PGSQL the most archaic db on the market nowadays. I never understood why PGSQL had so many fanboys, yet every major tech company always ditches it for mysql... i guess it is the case of "Any man who must say, "I am the King", is no true king." type of thing. People have to make a lot of noise to excuse their bad choices so they don't have to admit making a mistake.
- erpellan 1y ago
  I can’t believe they still make processors out of sand. Talk about outdated technology. Sarcasm aside, a great many projects started on MySQL and moved to postgres. As did projects using mongo, couchdb, firebase, oracle etc etc… And I’m sure many projects switched away from Postgres to other technologies. Right tool for the job at hand.
- lmz 1y ago
  By MVCC you mean the kind of MVCC that keeps old versions in the same space / requires vacuum? Because I'm pretty sure Oracle also does multiversioning using their undo log / rollback segment.
  - atombender 1y ago
    Calling undo/redo MVCC isn't really accurate. The whole point of Postgres' style of MVCC is that updates leave the original rows unmodified, which allows concurrent transactions to read them without extensive locking or redirection. In Oracle's database engine, when transaction A updates a row, it begins by reading the old row, updating it in-place, and adding the old row to the undo log. The heap row has a header with a list of transactions currently accessing that row and pointers into the undo log. If a transaction B comes in (while A is still ongoing) and wants to read the row, it startsby reading the current row header, where it sees that someone else has modified it, and then goes to the undo log to read the old version. (This is all very simplified.) The huge benefit of the undo log is that the main heap doesn't get bloated with old data. Deletes cause holes, of course, but updates do not. Meanwhile, the undo log can be trivially be truncated when rows are no longer needed. Postgres, since it effectively mixes undo data with current versions, needs to do vacuuming. Postgres may win when there's a huge amount of contention around hot spots, but arguably loses when it comes to "normal" transactional volume. OrioleDB adopts Oracle-style undo logging, among other table layout improvements, and their own OLTP benchmarks show extreme performance improvement over mainline Postgres.
franckpachot 1y ago
The companies that attempt to replace PostgreSQL do so not to replace PostgreSQL itself, but to replace Oracle.

erpellan 1y ago

If you look at the changes that have been made to Postgres, and continue to be made, the answer is yes. The Postgres team is working on replacing Postgres. With even better Postgres.

bddicken 1y ago
The Postgres team incorporating io_uring into PG 18 is a good example of this: https://pganalyze.com/blog/postgres-18-async-io https://pganalyze.com/blog/postgres-18-async-io.
zozbot234 1y ago
inb4 "It's the best Postgres we've ever made!"

eatonphil 1y ago

Who isn't? Cockroach rewrote Postgres in Go. CedarDB rewrote Postgres in C++. And then to lesser degrees you've got Yugabyte, AlloyDB, and Aurora DSQL (and certainly more I'm forgetting) that only replace parts of Postgres.

vladich 1y ago
Both Cockroach and CedarDB didn't rewrite anything, they built stuff from scratch. Just used the same client protocol. There are a bunch of other unrelated databases using Postgres protocol btw.
- eatonphil 1y ago
  I'm not talking about speaking the protocol. I'm talking about trying as hard as they can to be as indistinguishable from Postgres (to a non-operations user) as they can. And that list is very small.

gethly 1y ago

> Feels like it might be very useful since a lot of new technologies came out since spinning disks. The MVCC that Postgres uses(and no one else) is like 50yo outdated concept they still cling to. So just by virtue of that, it makes PGSQL the most archaic db on the market nowadays. I never understood why PGSQL had so many fanboys, yet every major tech company always ditches it for mysql... i guess it is the case of "Any man who must say, "I am the King", is no true king." type of thing. People have to make a lot of noise to excuse their bad choices so they don't have to admit making a mistake.

erpellan 1y ago
I can’t believe they still make processors out of sand. Talk about outdated technology. Sarcasm aside, a great many projects started on MySQL and moved to postgres. As did projects using mongo, couchdb, firebase, oracle etc etc… And I’m sure many projects switched away from Postgres to other technologies. Right tool for the job at hand.
lmz 1y ago
By MVCC you mean the kind of MVCC that keeps old versions in the same space / requires vacuum? Because I'm pretty sure Oracle also does multiversioning using their undo log / rollback segment.
- atombender 1y ago
  Calling undo/redo MVCC isn't really accurate. The whole point of Postgres' style of MVCC is that updates leave the original rows unmodified, which allows concurrent transactions to read them without extensive locking or redirection. In Oracle's database engine, when transaction A updates a row, it begins by reading the old row, updating it in-place, and adding the old row to the undo log. The heap row has a header with a list of transactions currently accessing that row and pointers into the undo log. If a transaction B comes in (while A is still ongoing) and wants to read the row, it startsby reading the current row header, where it sees that someone else has modified it, and then goes to the undo log to read the old version. (This is all very simplified.) The huge benefit of the undo log is that the main heap doesn't get bloated with old data. Deletes cause holes, of course, but updates do not. Meanwhile, the undo log can be trivially be truncated when rows are no longer needed. Postgres, since it effectively mixes undo data with current versions, needs to do vacuuming. Postgres may win when there's a huge amount of contention around hot spots, but arguably loses when it comes to "normal" transactional volume. OrioleDB adopts Oracle-style undo logging, among other table layout improvements, and their own OLTP benchmarks show extreme performance improvement over mainline Postgres.

franckpachot 1y ago

The companies that attempt to replace PostgreSQL do so not to replace PostgreSQL itself, but to replace Oracle.