... and unlike all the new databases, Postgres has a decent license. Everybody else is so afraid of being co-opted by AWS that they won't let you run them the way the way you want.

Reminds me Kai Lentit's ffmpeg video

https://youtu.be/9kaIXkImCAM

> Document store -> FerretDB

Love FerretDB, but it doesn't really replace MongoDB's GridFS which is main reason why most people who are really using Mongo now day. Anyone knows a good replacement for GridFS?

agree:

https://github.com/seanwevans/pg_os

https://github.com/seanwevans/pg_git

https://github.com/seanwevans/pg_gpt2

etc...

Are the various plugins easier to set up, configure, troubleshoot, etc. than the other software options? If I'm paged awake at 2am, will I have an easier time figuring out pgmq than I will RabbitMQ?

Couple that with a framework with decent server side rendered template support and htmx for network based interactions and you’ve got 90% of the <acronym_of_the_moment> stack with 10% of the complexity.

I have yet to have used UNLOGGED table in production, but I really want to try at some point. Anybody actually replaced a large Redis instance with this?

> This isn't about dogma. Sometimes you genuinely need specialized infrastructure. But the bar should be high: only after pushing Postgres to its limits, documenting why it was insufficient, and accepting the operational cost of the alternative.

I've seen a few "Use Postgres for Everything!" posts lately. It seems to be fashionable. It reminds me of the Choose Boring Technology[1] thing from 2018 or so, but more specific to a database.

I think the ideas of "don't add unnecessary dependencies" and "ruthlessly evaluate tradeoffs" and "prefer simplicity" and so on are general and have very little to with postgres, so when I see things like "All you need is X" I roll my eyes a little, because these decisions are highly dependent on your use case, and taken as blanket advice it is generally _bad_ advice even if the underlying rationale is sound.

[1]: https://mcfunley.com/choose-boring-technology

ETA: I am going through their list and so much of this means that you are going to manage your own PG cluster and not take advantage of Aurora or RDS, which means you're already committing to a major tradeoff if you want to use a lot of these custom extensions.

what about for blob storage too?

I love Postgres, and I agree with the general sentiment. But I read the (growing) genre of "use Postgres for everything" articles and they imply a difficulty in running other software that I just don't see.

I'm thinking of Redis in particular. If you're using it as incredibly fast but not critical storage, it's trivial to set up and it ~never crashes or requires maintenance. It creates no headaches, and in exchange gives me a k/v store that I can thrash without worrying about performance (I know it's fast), downstream impact (am I slowing down critical-path SQL queries), etc. Especially in the age of LLMs, which I've found to be great at devops-type tasks, I feel slightly less compelled to simplify my stack.

I'd love the ability to mark a table as "read committed" to prevent long running transactions from keeping old versions of a tuple alive, or even "read uncommitted" to enable in-place updates. Or perhaps instead of downgrading isolation, those serializable/snapshot transactions could simply fail when reading a value from such a table that was modified after they started.

An example of a table that would benefit from this would be rate-limits / concurrency-limits, which are commonly implemented using Redis instead of Postgres.

Postgres sucks. It does a little bit of everything, but badly and with much manual intervention.

I am very much in camp “minimize your dependencies and take the utmost advantage of what you already have” but I also am in camp “your database is the most important bottleneck component.”

This has two implications:

1) make sure if you use Postgres for anything beyond core rdbms functionality that there is no dependency between the two, so you can rip out the additional functionality and move to a different platform when you end up needing to reduce the load on your db server

2) if using Postgres for non-essentials complicates your db backup workflow, risks the data integrity, makes it difficult to maintain or upgrade your Postgres instance (eg you have to wait months or years for compatibility with newer Postgres versions), or loads relatively shoddy or unstable code into the beating heart of your application, then you should either use a different Postgres server/install/container for these ancillary services or bite the bullet and introduce an alternative dependency, depending on which makes more sense.

I love postgres, but the complexity of using it for everything starts to get pretty high, compared to more tailor-suited tools. We should probably use it for _more_, in general, but the cost of "everything in postgres" is generally higher than I see acknowledged in articles like these.