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by jghn 54 days ago
It scales beyond the needs that most people have in most situations.

The constant problem is that "big scale" always means "larger than I've seen", so on any project larger than a person has encountered, they assume they need to pull out the big guns. Also, people worry about things like what happens if they really *do* scale 10 years from now.

Neither is a practical concern for nearly anyone who will ever face this decision.

And then yes, of course, some people have problems that actually can't be solved by Postgres. But verify this first, don't assume.
2 comments
switchbak 54 days ago
What gets me is that some people seem to ignore the very real cliff of complexity that ramps up the moment you move to eventual consistency. If you need it you need it, but you have to bake in those assumptions everywhere - and they commonly break the default assumptions of those who don't have a bunch of experience with it or haven't architected their approach to work around those.

And in many cases it's those architectures that force more complexity and make it appear like they have much bigger challenges then they do. Great for resume driven development, but often you can get away with far less.

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tempest_ 54 days ago
The other thing is that now a days you scale way way further vertically before you scale horizontally (assuming you are not using a cloud provider)

Everyone is hung up making their shit "scalable" like its a systems design interview at google in 2010.

Now a days you get a box with 600+ cores and 4TB of RAM. That is going to cover a very very large percentage of most enterprises.

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andriy_koval 53 days ago
When you scale horizontally from day one, it usually gives fault tolerance for online service, and this story is not very friendly in case of vertically scaled PG.
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tempest_ 53 days ago
Scaling vertically does not mean you cant have fault tolerance and I feel like your comment just makes my point.
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andriy_koval 53 days ago
My point is that in PG, fault tolerance requires untrivial investments.

If you pick horizontally scalable DB (foundationdb, cocroachdb, scylladb, tidb, etc) they all give you fault tolerance for free without much involvement from your side, because it is part of the nature of those DBs.

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