[paulmd]

In the same vein as “is your product a business, or is it just a feature”, Postgres has really raised the bar to “is your product a database or an index in postgres”. There’s a few databases that make compelling cases for their existence, like Cassandra or Elastic/Solr, but surprisingly many databases really don’t offer anything that can’t be replicated with a GIN or GIST on Postgres. It is the amorphous blob swallowing up your product and turning it into a feature. JSON handling or json column types, are no longer a distinctive feature anymore, for example.

And a surprising amount of other stuff (similar to lisp inner platforms) converges on half-hearted, poorly-implemented replications of Postgres features… in this world you either evolve to Cassandra/elastic or return to postgres.

(not saying one or the other is better, mind you… ;)