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by DarkCrusader2 25 days ago
Given the unanimous consensus on HN that Postgres is all you will ever need. I will present 2 resources which I came across recently which changed my perspective on this blind reverence for Postgres for everything.

First is this Oxide and Friends episode [1] where Bryan and gang explains war stories related to operating Postgres during their Joyent days and why they went with Cockroach DB for Oxide.

Second is this amazing blog from brandur which explains several issues with using Postgres as high throughput queue and some mitigations.

Online forums like Hacker news can be a bit echo chamber-y. It is always good to ensure that the people you are taking advice from are solving the same problem as you.

[1] https://oxide-and-friends.transistor.fm/episodes/whither-coc... [2] https://brandur.org/postgres-queues

1 comments

These are valid push-backs on the "postgres everywhere" argument.

The two critical questions IMO are:

1. At what scale do these issues arise? 2. Does Postgres make it harder to solve them when you reach that scale than another solution would have?

Some of that probably depends on the libraries or tools you use on top of Postgres but being able to easily swap to Redis or a proper queue at scale should mitigate the risk of starting with Postgres if you don't already have the scale.