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You love Postgres because it takes four years to get requested features?

by dan15 11y ago

jsmthrowaway 11y ago
Postgres turned a corner around the 9.0 era and has been churning out huge features for years. Indexes on jsonb completely changed the game for me. As you can see from the commit, too, this was not a trivial feature. So yes, I'm overall pleased.
pilif 11y ago
If given the choice between do it half-assed but quickly and do it right but using how ever much time is required to arrive there, the PostgreSQL team always choses the latter approach. This conservatism works well for me considering we're talking about a database here. One of the contributors has written an interesting article explaining why upsert is difficult to get right (if by "right" you want it to complete reasonably quickly and without any chance of corrupting your data): http://www.depesz.com/2012/06/10/why-is-upsert-so-complicated/ http://www.depesz.com/2012/06/10/why-is-upsert-so-complicate...
colanderman 11y ago
Because the devs pay attention, and take the time to do things right. See https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/UPSERT https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/UPSERT for a glimpse into the design that needed to go behind this. I feel a lot of Postgres fans (myself included) put their "money" on Postgres circa late version 7 or early version 8, back when MySQL was the more featureful and performant of the two, while Postgres had the reputation for being more, shall we say, robust. (Remember, those were the days before InnoDB was the default in MySQL.) The payout for investment in Postgres the past few years has been substantial -- native replication, true serializable transactions, foreign data wrappers, index-only scans, native JSON support, updatable views, and materialized views are among the features added to Postgres in the last 4 years. It's matured from being an "entry-level" RDBMS with few features that all work reliably, to a much more enterprise-friendly RDBMS with many features that still work reliably.
- pilif 11y ago
  > late version 7 or early version 8, back when MySQL was the more featureful and performant of the two MySQL was never more featureful. The reason I started migrating back in the 7.1 time frame (when TOAST tables were added and you could finally store more than 8K of text in a TEXT column) was the lack of sub-selects in MySQL. Even aside of that, Postgres was far ahead when considering basic SQL support: stored procedures, views, subselects, check constraints, triggers, actually enforcing foreign key constraints and so on. It was significantly slower than MySQL, but it also scaled much better under load. Back then, when you had low load, MySQL would be about twice as fast as PostgreSQL but then as the load increases, MySQL's performance would drop sharply and Postgres would stay consistent. By now, MySQL has mostly caught up feature-wise, but there's still stuff left that Postgres just does better. Also, even plain ideological reasons (community project vs. oracle open-core project) would want me to stay with postgres. I also have anecdotal evidence that MySQL still has serious issues in the robustness department which I've yet to see with postgres.
  - threeseed 11y ago
    MariaDB, WebScaleSQL, Percona are just three MySQL forks that are completely open source in every single way. Likewise MySQL-Server is GPL so it definitely should be considered as open source. And if MySQL wasn't robust then YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Alibaba, LinkedIn etc wouldn't be using it for core parts of their infrastructure. It's definitely robust. No doubt that PostgreSQL is better at MySQL in many areas though and probably could do with a self contained, single download PostgreSQL Cluster edition.
    - slapresta 11y ago
      > And if MySQL wasn't robust then YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Alibaba, LinkedIn etc wouldn't be using it for core parts of their infrastructure. It's definitely robust. Popularity is not an argument for quality. See: crocs, Justin Bieber, PHP. Those companies you mentioned, like many others, probably use it because they're locked in that technology, not because it's a superior one. Just like banks still use COBOL. If you're interested on knowing why using MySQL isn't a good idea, there's this (highly opinionated, obviously) post about it: http://grimoire.ca/mysql/choose-something-else http://grimoire.ca/mysql/choose-something-else

You love Postgres because it takes four years to get requested features?

by dan15 11y ago

You love Postgres because it takes four years to get requested features?

Postgres turned a corner around the 9.0 era and has been churning out huge features for years. Indexes on jsonb completely changed the game for me. As you can see from the commit, too, this was not a trivial feature. So yes, I'm overall pleased.

pilif 11y ago

If given the choice between do it half-assed but quickly and do it right but using how ever much time is required to arrive there, the PostgreSQL team always choses the latter approach. This conservatism works well for me considering we're talking about a database here. One of the contributors has written an interesting article explaining why upsert is difficult to get right (if by "right" you want it to complete reasonably quickly and without any chance of corrupting your data): http://www.depesz.com/2012/06/10/why-is-upsert-so-complicated/ http://www.depesz.com/2012/06/10/why-is-upsert-so-complicate...

colanderman 11y ago

Because the devs pay attention, and take the time to do things right. See https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/UPSERT https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/UPSERT for a glimpse into the design that needed to go behind this. I feel a lot of Postgres fans (myself included) put their "money" on Postgres circa late version 7 or early version 8, back when MySQL was the more featureful and performant of the two, while Postgres had the reputation for being more, shall we say, robust. (Remember, those were the days before InnoDB was the default in MySQL.) The payout for investment in Postgres the past few years has been substantial -- native replication, true serializable transactions, foreign data wrappers, index-only scans, native JSON support, updatable views, and materialized views are among the features added to Postgres in the last 4 years. It's matured from being an "entry-level" RDBMS with few features that all work reliably, to a much more enterprise-friendly RDBMS with many features that still work reliably.

pilif 11y ago
> late version 7 or early version 8, back when MySQL was the more featureful and performant of the two MySQL was never more featureful. The reason I started migrating back in the 7.1 time frame (when TOAST tables were added and you could finally store more than 8K of text in a TEXT column) was the lack of sub-selects in MySQL. Even aside of that, Postgres was far ahead when considering basic SQL support: stored procedures, views, subselects, check constraints, triggers, actually enforcing foreign key constraints and so on. It was significantly slower than MySQL, but it also scaled much better under load. Back then, when you had low load, MySQL would be about twice as fast as PostgreSQL but then as the load increases, MySQL's performance would drop sharply and Postgres would stay consistent. By now, MySQL has mostly caught up feature-wise, but there's still stuff left that Postgres just does better. Also, even plain ideological reasons (community project vs. oracle open-core project) would want me to stay with postgres. I also have anecdotal evidence that MySQL still has serious issues in the robustness department which I've yet to see with postgres.
- threeseed 11y ago
  MariaDB, WebScaleSQL, Percona are just three MySQL forks that are completely open source in every single way. Likewise MySQL-Server is GPL so it definitely should be considered as open source. And if MySQL wasn't robust then YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Alibaba, LinkedIn etc wouldn't be using it for core parts of their infrastructure. It's definitely robust. No doubt that PostgreSQL is better at MySQL in many areas though and probably could do with a self contained, single download PostgreSQL Cluster edition.
  - slapresta 11y ago
    > And if MySQL wasn't robust then YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Alibaba, LinkedIn etc wouldn't be using it for core parts of their infrastructure. It's definitely robust. Popularity is not an argument for quality. See: crocs, Justin Bieber, PHP. Those companies you mentioned, like many others, probably use it because they're locked in that technology, not because it's a superior one. Just like banks still use COBOL. If you're interested on knowing why using MySQL isn't a good idea, there's this (highly opinionated, obviously) post about it: http://grimoire.ca/mysql/choose-something-else http://grimoire.ca/mysql/choose-something-else