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by bananapub 980 days ago
that really should be the first heuristic for almost any systems design problem - if you can afford to buy a big enough pair of machines to fit your data in hot-swap postgres then just do that.

don't bother with mongo or mysql or dynamo or cassandra or bigtable or spanner or ... until your lack of profitability or size means you can't afford to just use postgres.
1 comments
meowtimemania 980 days ago
What do you mean "can't afford to just use postgres"? I thought postgres cost per query in many cases is cheaper than competitors.
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bananapub 980 days ago
> What do you mean "can't afford to just use postgres"?

if I have 10TB of hot data, can I afford two machines with 10T of RAM each? how about 100T?

> I thought postgres cost per query in many cases is cheaper than competitors.

that's not really a useful metric without size/latency/etc attached to it, being cheap for 0.1qps might be fine for a YC company but that's no good for my successful company etc

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meowtimemania 980 days ago
Makes sense. Thanks for the response!
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