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by anthony_doan 2037 days ago
It's not the language but more about how the data is store (data structures/indexes) and what you're going to do with the data.

At least during my time as a developer, I've come across many people that didn't understand this. When asked why they want to use elasticsearch over RMDB is it because they wanted Trie over B+tree? They didn't understand. Also the use cases almost always relational. Postgres have good enough FTS actually if anything elasticsearch is almost always a complement database not a replacement to RMDB.

1 comments

Honestly folks choose elasticsearch only in part for Trie over B+tree. It provides a fair amount of magic wrt to appropriate defaults for dealing with large datasets in a distributed store.

I think a lot of folks would be better off with RMDB, but if you barely know SQL and spend most of your time making UIs, you’re lucky to have the breadth of know-how to configure Postgres the right way (no offense intended to frontend developers).

Of course, Elasticsearch’s magic defaults expectations may come back to bite you later on when you’re using it OOTB this way, but it’s hard to argue with throwing a ton of data in it and then -POOF- you have highly performant replicated queries, with views that are written in your “home” programming language, without even really necessarily understanding what your schema was to start with (yikes, but also, I get it).