9 ms·

It's 2026, Just Use Postgres

• otabdeveloper4 8mo ago
  No thanks. In 2026 I want HA and replication out of the box without the insanity.
  • nrvn 8mo ago
    Exactly my thoughts immediately after reading the word “just”. Also, PITR.
  • eikenberry 8mo ago
    Came to say the same thing. Personally I'd only touch Postgres in a couple cases. 1. Downtime doesn't matter. 2. Paying someone else (eg. AWS) to manage redundancy and fail-over. It just feels crazy to me that Postgres still doesn't have a native HA story since I last battled with this well over a decade ago.
  • groundzeros2015 8mo ago
    You exceeded the step of maxing out the best server you can buy?
    • throwaway7783 8mo ago
      HA is not about exceeding the limits of a server. Its about still serving traffic when that best server I bought goes offline (or has failed memory chip, or a disk or... ).
      • groundzeros2015 8mo ago
        Replication?
        • lima 8mo ago
          Postgres replication, even in synchronous mode, does not maintain its consistency guarantees during network partitions. It's not a CP system - I don't think it would actually pass a Jepsen test suite in a multi-node setup[1]. No amount of tooling can fix this without a consensus mechanism for transactions. Same with MySQL and many other "traditional" databases. It tends to work out because these failures are rare and you can get pretty close with external leader election and fencing, but Postgres is NOT easy (likely impossible) to operate as a CP system according to the CAP theorem. There are various attempts at fixing this (Yugabyte, Neon, Cockroach, TiDB, ...) which all come with various downsides. [1]: Someone tried it with Patroni and failed miserably, https://www.binwang.me/2024-12-02-PostgreSQL-High-Availability-Solutions-Part-1.html https://www.binwang.me/2024-12-02-PostgreSQL-High-Availabili...
  • riku_iki 7mo ago
    so, what do you use instead?
• nickmonad 8mo ago
  Unless you're doing OLTP. Then, TigerBeetle ;)
• m4ck_ 8mo ago
  but mongo is webscale.
• user3939382 8mo ago
  Do tell about all your greenfield yet large scale persistence needs where this discussion even applies
• asdev 8mo ago
  probably not many Firebase users here but I love Firebase's Firestore
  • oulipo2 8mo ago
    It's very bad to search stuff, or have structured database, also it costs a lot
    • asdev 8mo ago
      its dirt cheap and you can do basic search
      • oulipo2 7mo ago
        It's not cheap at all once you scale
  • L0Wigh 7mo ago
    I first used Firebase/Firestore recently at work, and I was kind of surprised on how it's easy to use. Not my first time with NoSQL databases, but was impressed still
• cpursley 8mo ago
  Good stuff, I turned my gist into an info site and searchable directory (and referenced this article as well, which seems to pay homage to my gist, which in turn inspired the site) https://PostgresIsEnough.dev https://PostgresIsEnough.dev
  • jen20 8mo ago
    This is a good summary, though I'd love to see a "High Availability and Automated Failover" entry in that table.
• antirez 8mo ago
  The point of Redis is data structures and algorithmic complexity of operations. If you use Redis well, you can't replace it with PostgreSQL. But I bet you can't replace memcached either for serious use cases.
  • yalldidwhat 8mo ago
    Did someone really downvote the creator of Redis?
    • antirez 8mo ago
      All the time here in HN, I'm proud of it -- happy to have opinions not necessarily aligned with what users want to listen to. Also: never trust the establishment without thinking! ;D
      • aa-jv 7mo ago
        As a longtime fan of your work I appreciate very much how willing you are to get into the trench with your users. It is always a delight to see you engage in an interesting, intelligent conversation with those who have a different opinion from you. Thanks for being cool, antirez.
        • antirez 7mo ago
          Thank you so much for this comment <3
    • WorkerBee28474 8mo ago
      IIRC there was a pre-edit version with snark.
      • antirez 8mo ago
        Yes, but the downvotes came later too, I edited it with the same exact content but without the asshole that is in me. Still downvotes received.
• olivia-banks 8mo ago
  I do agree, I don’t know why more people don’t just use Postgres. If I’m doing data exploration with lots of data (e.g., GIS, nD vectors), I’ll just spin up a Postgres.app on my macOS laptop, install what little I need, and it just works and is plenty fast for my needs. It’s a really great choice for a lot of domains. That being said, while I think Postgres is “the right tool for the job” in many cases, sometimes you just want (relative) simplicity, both in terms of complexity and deployment, and should use something like SQLite. I think it’s unwise to understate simplicity, and I use it to run a few medium-traffic servers (at least, medium traffic for the hardware I run it on).
  • koeng 8mo ago
    I am also a fan of SQLite. One of the best parts during development is how easy it is to spin up and spin down databases for full integration tests without containers or anything. It also simplifies backups, and is probably good enough.
    • herpdyderp 8mo ago
      These days I would recommend PGlite for testing purposes when you use Postgres in production. That way you don't need any specific SGQLite vs Postgres behavior switches.
  • trueno 8mo ago
    i think the topic of "what data backend" gets super conflated into many different variations of what the hell people need it for. discussions here go so many different directions. some people are building simple webapps, some are building complex webapps that need to scale for a gazillion users, some are building local apps, some are just tinkering, some are thinking broadly about how their backend needs to sync with a datalake->some data warehouse at an org, yadda yadda ya. i personally like postgres myself for just about all use cases that must be shared with others (app with more than one client that might be providing CRUD updates or anything really that demands a central data store). ive used sqlite a couple times with WAL to try and make a small app shared between 2-3 people who all would contribute updates thru it but it wasnt ideal. for postgres so many features/extensions its concurrent writes are fast as hell and if you just want to one-shot a solution then you cant go wrong, but it's ofc not the same as sqlite setup. i think a lot of the pain with postgres is just learning to effectively be a knowledgeable db admin of sorts. its somewhere between being a competent devops guy and a dbadmin expert all in one. if you're actually doing some kind of production deployment it is kinda scary hoping you've got everything set up right. even supabase which makes this whole process trivial to get going requires an understanding of not-always-understood security premises that just make things spooky. lot of words to say i dont get much out of these discussions tbh. theres just too many use cases and variables in everyones working/hobby lives im not sure that there is a proverbial bottom to any of it. some will use sqlite and some will use postgres and some will use some weird thing no ones heard of because they're afraid to rawdog sql and just want immediate graphql capability to be the main mode of data retrieval. some will show up here and talk about why you need redis in the middle. its too much noise so i just keep using postgres because its free and boring and fast. end of the day i just want to make stuff people can use. it's a hard endeavor to do well alone, if you dont have a team of other experts who can help you put all the puzzle pieces together on how to deploy things the right way and also add pieces like redis or whatever... it's just a lot. it's hard to find where to get started. sqlite is the only solution that really by nature of what it is seems to champion the lonely developer, but the tradeoffs are big if you're trying to make something that should get used by many people.
• lucas1068 8mo ago
  I've found that Postgres consumes (by default) more disk than, for example, MySQL. And the difference is quite significant. That means more money that I have to pay every month. But, sure Postgres seems like I system that integrates a lot of subsystems, that adds a lot of complexity too. I'm just marking the bad points because you mention the good points in the post. You're also trying to sell you service, which is good too.
  • EvanAnderson 8mo ago
    Some people do Postgres on compressed ZFS volumes to great success.
    • ddtaylor 8mo ago
      I am curious if you know anyone using Btrfs for this too. I like ZFS, but it Btrfs can do this it would be easier to use with some distros, etc. as it's supported in kernel.
      • riku_iki 8mo ago
        I do it. The big problem for me from running DB on Btrfs is that when I delete large dirs or files (100GB+), it locks disk system, and Db basically stop responding on any queries. I am very surprised that FS which is considered prod grade having this issue..
        • jlundberg 8mo ago
          Try XFS if you havn’t yet. Very solid and no such issues.
          • ddtaylor 8mo ago
            I haven't used XFS in almost two decades, does it have compression support in the same way? Also, does it do JBOD stuff? I know it's a bit of a different thing, but I really enjoy the pool many disks together part of Btrfs, although it has its limitations.
• oulipo2 8mo ago
  Nice! How do you "preinstall the extensions" so that you can have eg timescaledb and others available to install in your Postgres? Do you need to install some binaries first?
• malkosta 8mo ago
  Elixir + Postgres is the microservices killer...last time I saw VP try to convince a company with this stack to go microservices he was out in less than 6mo
  • cpursley 8mo ago
    This is the killer combo. Working on something now that uses pgmq + Elixir for DAG workflows: https://github.com/agoodway/pgflow https://github.com/agoodway/pgflow
    • cies 8mo ago
      I prefer bit more type-safety. JVM/Kotlin/Jdbi + PG for me.
• kibibu 8mo ago
  Blog posts, like academic papers, should have to divulge how AI has been used to write them.
  • tallytarik 8mo ago
    Yes this is clearly verbatim output from an LLM. But it's perfect HN bait, really. The title is spicy enough that folks will comment without reading the article (more so than usual), and so it survives a bit longer before being flagged as slop.
    • ddtaylor 8mo ago
      Is HN guidelines to flag AI content? I am unsure of how flagging for this is supposed to work on HN and have only ever used the flag feature for obvious spam or scams.
      • furyofantares 8mo ago
        It might be wrong, but I have started flagging this shit daily. Garbage articles that waste my time as a person who comes on here to find good articles. I understand that reading the title and probably skimming the article makes it a good jumping off point for a comment thread. I do like the HN comments but I don't want it to be just some forum of curious tech folks, I want it to be a place I find interesting content too.
        • ddtaylor 8mo ago
          I agree. It seems this is kind of a shelling point right now on HN and there isn't a clear guideline yet. I think your usage of flagging makes sense. Thanks
  • itisit 8mo ago
    Granted it's often easy to tell on your own, but when I'm uncertain I use GPTZero's Chrome extension for this. Eventually I'll stop doing that and assume most of what I read outside of select trusted forums is genAI.
• bastardoperator 8mo ago
  I don't disagree, but I think big enterprises expect support, roadmaps, and the ability to ask for deliverables depending on the sale or context of the service.
• samuelknight 8mo ago
  Skeptical about replacing Redis with a table serialized to disk. The point of Redis is that it is in memory and you can smash it with hot path queries while taking a lot of load off the backing DB. Also that design requires a cron which means the table could fill disk between key purges.
  • dry_soup 8mo ago
    From the article, using UNLOGGED tables puts them in memory, not on disk
    • samuelknight 8mo ago
      I the article is wrong. UNLOGGED means it isn't written to WAL which means recovery and rollback guarantees won't work since the transaction can finish before the page can be synchronized on disk. The table loses integrity as a trade off for a faster write. https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/sql-createtable.html#SQL-CREATETABLE-UNLOGGED https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/sql-createtable.html...
• mauritsd 8mo ago
  This kind of thing gets posted every couple of months. Databases like Pinecone and Redis are more cost-effective and capable for their special use case, often dramatically so. In some circumstances the situation favours solving the problem in Postgres rather than adding a database. But that should be evaluated on a case-by-case basis. For example, if you run something at scale and have an ops team the penalty of adding a second database is much smaller. (I run a medium-sized Postgres deployment and like it, but I don't feel like it's a cost-effective solution to every database problem.)
  • PunchyHamster 8mo ago
    Once you have an app, a lot of data, and actual problems, it's far easier to pick the right alternative. PostgreSQL is good enough to get to medium sized with nearly every use case. Once you are there, you have the use case and the test data to test any alternative for it well, rather than trying to guess beforehand what you actually need. The advice is basically "PostgreSQL is probably good enough for whatever you're building now, and you should only look for other solution once you are big enough that it stops being that"
    • fuzzzerd 7mo ago
      Could make the same argument for SQLite, the threshold is lower, but similarly you can pretty far with it. Then decide what's next, once you're out growing it.
• vb-8448 8mo ago
  It's 5th of feb 2026, and we already get our monthly "just use postgres" thread btw, big fan of postgres :D
• sailfast 8mo ago
  Love the sentiment! And I'm a user - but what about aggregations? Elasticsearch offers a ton of aggregates out of the box for "free" completely configurable by query string. Tiger Data offers continuous aggs via hypertable but they need to be configured quite granularly and they're not super flexible. How are you all thinking about that when it comes to postgres and aggregations?
  • kokanee 8mo ago
    I love postgres and it really is a supertool. But to get exactly what you need can require digging deep and really having control over the lowest levels. My experience after using timescale/tigerdata for the last couple years is that I really just wish RDS supported the timescale extension; TigerData's layers on top of that have caused as many problems as they've solved.
• SoKamil 8mo ago
  This post is discussing more specialized databases, but why would people choose Oracle/Microsoft DB instead of Postgres? Your own experience is welcome.
  • bob1029 8mo ago
    I'd pick MSSQL if I was being compensated based upon the accuracy, performance, durability and availability of the system. Also in any cases where the customer can pay and won't complain even once about how much this costs. I'd never advocate for a new oracle install. But, I'd likely defend an existing one. I've seen how effective pl/sql can be in complex environments. Rewriting all that sql just because "oracle man bad" (or whatever) is a huge fucking ask of any rational business owner.
  • technion 8mo ago
    Easy answer here - nearly every LOB app we have uses MSSQL. I've had engineers want to talk about syncing it to MySQL using some custom plumbing so that they can build a reporting infra around their MySQL stack, but it's just another layer of complexity over having code just use Microsoft's reporting services. I'll add, having finance people with Excel really like being able to pull data directly from MSSQL, they do not like hearing about a technican's python app.
• oldestofsports 8mo ago
  Caching is mentioned in the article: What do you guys feel about using PostgreSQL for caching instead of Redis? Redis is many times faster, so much that it doesn't seem comparable to me. A lot of data you can get away with just caching in-mem on each node, but when you have many nodes there are valid cases where you really want that distributed cache.
  • simonw 8mo ago
    Prove that you need the extra speed. Run benchmarks that show that, for your application under your expected best-case loads, using Redis for caching instead of PostgreSQL provides a meaningful improvement. If it doesn't provide a meaningful improvement, stick with PostgreSQL.
    • calderarrow 8mo ago
      This is the proper approach when deciding whether to use any type of tool or technology. Is the increased amount of cognitive overhead for someone with minimal exposure to your system (who will have to maintain it when you’ve moved on) worth the increased performance on a dollars-per-hour basis? If so, it may be a good option. If not, it doesn’t matter how much better the relative performance is.
    • christophilus 8mo ago
      Yep. And often, if you do find a need for a cache, you can get away with an in-app cache before moving to something like Redis.
  • dgxyz 8mo ago
    Neither. Just use memcache for query cache if you have to. And only if you have to, because invalidation is hard. It's cheap, reliable, mature, fast, scalable, requires little understanding, has decent quality clients in most languages, is not stateful and available off the shelf in most cloud providers and works in-clusetr in kubernetes if you want to do it that way. I can't find a use case for Redis that postgres or postgres+memcache isn't a simpler and/or superior solution. Just to give you an idea how good memcache is, I think we had 9 billion requests across half a dozen nodes over a few years without a single process restart.
• zzzeek 8mo ago
  Lots of familiar things here except for this UNLOGGED table as a cache thing. That's totally new to me. Has someone benched this approach against memcached and redis ? I'm extremely skeptical PGs query / protocol overheads are going to be competitive with memcached, but I'm making this up and have nothing to back it up.
  • olavgg 8mo ago
    Its not only about performance, Redis data structures offer an even more advanced caching and data processing. I even use Redis as a cache for ClickHouse.
  • mekoka 8mo ago
    They don't compare exactly. Author is mistaken in thinking that UNLOGGED means "in memory". It means "no WAL", so there's considerable speed up there, but traded in with also more volatility. To be a viable alternative to Redis or Memcached though, the savings you get from the latter two must really be superfluous to your use case. Which could be true for many (most?).
• deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]
• tayo42 8mo ago
  I feel like this is selling redis short on its features. Im also curious about benchmark results.
• derefr 8mo ago
  Something TFA doesn’t mention, but which I think is actually the most important distinction of all to be making here: If you follow this advice naively, you might try to implement two or more of these other-kind-of-DB simulacra data models within the same Postgres instance. And it’ll work, at first. Might even stay working if only one of the workloads ends up growing to a nontrivial size. But at scale, these different-model workloads will likely contend with one-another, starving one-another of memory or disk-cache pages; or you’ll see an “always some little thing happening” workload causing a sibling “big once-in-a-while” workload to never be able to acquire table/index locks to do its job (or vice versa — the big workloads stalling the hot workloads); etc. And even worse, you’ll be stuck when it comes to fixing this with instance-level tuning. You can only truly tune a given Postgres instance to behave well for one type-of-[scaled-]workload at a time. One workload-type might use fewer DB connections and depend for efficiency on them having a higher `work_mem` and `max_parallel_workers` each; while another workload-type might use many thousands of short-lived connections and depend on them having small `work_mem` so they’ll all fit. But! The conclusion you should draw from being in this situation shouldn’t be “oh, so Postgres can’t handle these types of workloads.” No; Postgres can handle each of these workloads just fine. It’s rather that your single monolithic do-everything Postgres instance, maybe won’t be able to handle this heterogeneous mix of workloads with very different resource and tuning requirements. But that just means that you need more Postgres. I.e., rather than adding a different type-of-component to your stack, you can just add another Postgres instance, tuned specifically to do that type of work. Why do that, rather than adding a component explicitly for caching/key-values/documents/search/graphs/vectors/whatever? Well, for all the reasons TFA outlines. This “Postgres tuned for X” instance will still be Postgres, and so you’ll still get all the advantages of being able to rely on a single query language, a single set of client libraries and tooling, a single coherent backup strategy, etc. Where TFA’s “just use Postgres” in the sense of reusing your Postgres instance only scales if your DB is doing a bare minimum of that type of work, interpreting “just use Postgres” in the sense of adding a purpose-defined Postgres instance to your stack will scale nigh-on indefinitely. (To the point that, if you ever do end up needing what a purpose-built-for-that-workload datastore can give you, you’ll likely be swapping it out for an entire purpose-defined PG cluster by that point. And the effort will mostly serve the purpose of OpEx savings, rather than getting you anything cool.) And, as a (really big) bonus of this approach, you only need to split PG this way where it matters, i.e. in production, at scale, at the point that the new workload-type is starting to cause problems/conflicts. Which means that, if you make your codebase(s) blind to where exactly these workloads live (e.g. by making them into separate DB connection pools configured by separate env-vars), then: - in dev (and in CI, staging, etc), everything can default to happening on the one local PG instance. Which means bootstrapping a dev-env is just `brew install postgres`. - and in prod, you don’t need to pre-build with new components just to serve your new need. No new Redis instance VM just to serve your so-far-tiny KV-storage needs. You start with your new workload-type sharing your “miscellaneous business layer” PG instance; and then, if and when it becomes a problem, you migrate it out.
• deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]
• ddtaylor 8mo ago
  I made the switch from MySQL to postgres a few years ago I didn't really understand what everyone was excited about before I made the switch. I haven't used MySQL since and I think postgres provides everything I need the only thing that I ever snarl at is how many dials and knobs and options there are that's not a bad thing!
  • trueno 8mo ago
    > the only thing that I ever snarl at is how many dials and knobs and options there are that's not a bad thing! yea this is me. postgres is actually insane for how much is offered at checks notes free.99. _however_ we are probably due for like. I don't know a happy configurator type tool that has reasonable presets and a nice user friendly config tool that helps people get going without sidequesting for a year on devops/dbadmin expertise. that isn't even a favored outcome imo, you just get pretty lukewarm postgres-deployers who are probably missing a bunch of important settings/flags. my team mates would probably shit themselves in the face of postgres configs currently, they are absolute rats in the code but good and proper deployment of postgres is just a whole other career-arc they haven't journeyed and a _lot_ of organizations don't always have a devops/dbadmin type guy readily available any time you want to scrap together an app who's just going to wait for your signal to deploy for you. or said devops/dbadmin guy is just.. one guy and he's supporting 500 other things. not saying the absence/failing to scale teams with such personnel is right, it's just the reality and being up against workplace politics and making the case to convince orgs to hire a bigger team of devops/dbadmin guys involves a lot of shitty meetings and political prowess that is typically beyond an engineers set of capabilities, at least below the senior level. any engineer can figure out how to deploy postgres to something, but are they doing it in a way that makes an orgs security/infra guys happy? probably not. are they prepared to handle weird storage scenarios (log or temp space filling grinding server to a halt) and understand the weird and robust ways to manage a deployment? probably not.
• program_whiz 8mo ago
  Can anyone comment on whether postgres can replace full columnar DB? I see "full text search" but it feels like this is falling a little short of the full power of elastic -- but would be happy to be wrong (one less tech to remember).
  • irishcoffee 8mo ago
    According to the LLM google search result, yes. Have you looked into it?
  • fourseventy 8mo ago
    There are several different plugins for postgres that do columnar tables, including the company TigerData which wrote this blog
• guelo 8mo ago
  This is the future of all devtools in the AI era. There's no reason for tool innovation because we'll just use whatever AIs know best which will always be the most common thing in their training data. It's a self-reinforcing loop. The most common languages, tools, libraries of today are what we will be stuck with for the foreseeable future.
  • gavmor 8mo ago
    Is that any different from "we'll just use whatever devs know best, which will always be the most common thing?" eg Python, react... very little OCaml, Haskell, etc.
• tombert 8mo ago
  Meh. I agree that managing lots of databases can be a pain in the ass, but trying to make Postgres do everything seems like a problem as well. A lot of these things are different things and trying to make Postgres do all of them seems like it will lead to similar if not worse outcomes than having separate dedicated services. I understand that people were too overeager to jump on the MongoDB web scale nosql crap, but at this point I think there might have been an overcorrection. The problem with the nosql hype wasn't that they weren't using SQL, it's that they were shoehorning it everywhere, even in places where it wasn't a good fit for the job. Now this blog post is telling us to shoehorn Postgres everywhere, even if it isn't a good fit for the job...
  • cyanydeez 8mo ago
    to be fair, Postgres cana basically do everything Mongo can and just as well.
    • tombert 8mo ago
      Ok, I'm a little skeptical of that claim but let's grant it. I still don't think Postgres is going to do everything Kafka and Redis can do as well as Kafka or Redis.
      • cpursley 8mo ago
        pgmq gets very close for a lot of Kafka use cases
• TheAceOfHearts 8mo ago
  I'll take it one step further and say you should always ask yourself if the application or project even needs a beefy database like Postgres or if you can get by with using SQLite. For example, I've found a few self-hosted services that just overcomplicated their setup and deployment because they picked Postgres or MariaDB over SQLite, despite it being a much better self-contained solution.
  • timeinput 8mo ago
    I find that if I want to use JSON storage I'm somewhat stuck choosing my DB stack. If I want to use JSON, and change my database from SQLite to Postgres I have to substantially change my interface to the DB. If I use only SQLite, or only Postgres it's not so bad, but the transition cost to "efficient" JSON use in Postgres from a small demo in SQLite is kind of high compared to just starting with an extra docker run (for a Postgres server) / docker compose / k8s yaml / ... that has my code + a Postgres database. I really like having some JSON storage because I don't know my schema up front all the time, and just shoving every possible piece of potentially useful metadata in there has (generally) not bit me, but not having that critical piece of metadata has been annoying (that field that should be NOT NULL is NULL because I can't populated it after the fact).
  • nikisweeting 8mo ago
    SQLite is great until you try to do any kind of multi-writer stuff. Theres no SELECT FOR UPDATE locking and no parallel write support, if any of your writes take more than a few ms you end up having to manage queueing at the application layer, which means you end up having to build your own concurrent-safe multi-writer queue anyway.
• saisrirampur 8mo ago
  I’m a huge Postgres fan. That said, I don’t agree with the blanket advice of “just use Postgres.” That stance often comes from folks who haven’t been exposed enough to (newer) purpose-built technologies and the tremendous value they can create The argument, as in this blog, is that a single Postgres stack is simpler and reduces complexity. What’s often overlooked is the CAPEX and OPEX required to make Postgres work well for workloads it wasn’t designed for, at even reasonable scale. At Citus Data, we saw many customers with solid-sized teams of Postgres experts whose primary job was constant tuning, operating, and essentially babysitting the system to keep it performing at scale. Side note, we’re seeing purpose-built technologies show up much earlier in a company’s lifecycle, likely accelerated by AI-driven use cases. At ClickHouse, many customers using Postgres replication are seed-stage companies that have grown extremely quickly. We pulled together some data on these trends here: https://clickhouse.com/blog/postgres-cdc-year-in-review-2025#use-cases https://clickhouse.com/blog/postgres-cdc-year-in-review-2025... A better approach would be to embrace the integration of purpose-built technologies with Postgres, making it easier for users to get the best of both worlds, rather than making overgeneralized claims like “Postgres for everything” or “Just use Postgres.”
  • pimlottc 8mo ago
    I took it to mean “make Postgres your default choice”, not “always use Postgres no matter what”
    • saisrirampur 8mo ago
      I personally see a difference between “just use Postgres” and “make Postgres your default choice.” The latter leaves room to evaluate alternatives when the workload calls for it, while the former does not. When that nuance gets lost, it can become misleading for teams that are hitting or even close to hitting—the limits of Postgres, who may continue tuning Postgres spending not only time but also significant $$. IMO a better world is one where developers can have a mindset of using best-in-class where needed. This is where embracing integrations with Postgres will be helpful!
      • 8mo ago
• sheerun 8mo ago
  Postgres is king of its own, other solutions can be incorporated in it eventually by someone or some organization, that's it
• throwaway81523 8mo ago
  Gad, they sure like to say "BM25" over and over again. That's a near worthless approach to result ranking. Doing any halfway ok job requires much more tuned and/or more powerful approaches.
  • throwaway7783 8mo ago
    Can you please elaborate why?
  • cpursley 8mo ago
    It's common to do a hybrid of BM25 with other fuzzy search or pgvector.
    • storus 8mo ago
      BM25 is quite bad and needs to be retrained for each corpus anew. SPLADEv2 is much better and there are even better sparse embeddings these days.
• remich 8mo ago
  Get AWS to actually support pgvectorscale and timescaledb for RDS or Aurora and then maybe... sigh....
• ablob 8mo ago
  I really wonder how "It's year X" could establish itself as an argument this popular.
  • gherkinnn 7mo ago
    I remember $CURRENT_YEAR taking off around 2016 where it was used in the innocent days of the culture wars alongside terms like "dongle" and "shitlord".
• whatifnomoney 8mo ago
  [dead]
• bluepuma77 8mo ago
  Now we only need easy self-hosted Postgres clustering for HA. Postgres seems to need additional tooling. There is Patroni, which doesn't provide container images. There is Spilo, which provides Postgres images with Patroni, but they are not really maintained. There is a timescaledb-ha image with Patroni, but no documentation how to use it. It seems the only easy way for hosting a Postgres cluster is to use CloudNativePG, but that requires k8s. It would be awesome to have easy clustering directly built-in. Similar to MongoDB, where you tell the primary instance to use a replica set, then simply connect two secondaries to primary, done.
  • lima 8mo ago
    Postgres is not a CP database, and even with synchronous replication, it can lose writes during network partitions. It would not pass the Jepsen test suite. This is very hard to fix and requires significant architectural changes (like Yugabyte or Neon have done).
    • riku_iki 7mo ago
      > Postgres is not a CP database, and even with synchronous replication, it can lose writes during network partitions. Argument is that partitioning almost never happens, because of network reliably rerouting traffic.
      • lima 7mo ago
        Reliable networks don't actually exist[1]. Clearly, it's possible to reduce the risk to the point where many companies are willing to accept it, but it's still a problem and comes with high operational costs. And for some use cases (like finance), even a small risk of undefined database behavior or lost writes is unacceptable. The future are distributed databases with consensus, and unfortunately, Postgres isn't there yet. [1]: https://aphyr.com/posts/288-the-network-is-reliable https://aphyr.com/posts/288-the-network-is-reliable
        • riku_iki 7mo ago
• coolgoose 8mo ago
  I mean, it's a pain at times to keep elastic in sync with the main db, but saying elastic is just an algorithm for text search feels odd.
• dimgl 8mo ago
  I've actually started moving away from Postgres to MySQL and SQLite. I don't want to have to deal with the vacuums/maintenance/footguns.
  • christophilus 8mo ago
    I’ve thought of doing this myself. Upgrades also seem easier in MySQL. That said, it does seem to be stagnating relative to Postgres.
  • DJBunnies 8mo ago
    I'm in the same boat, the idiosyncrasies of postgres are real; mysql / sqlite are far more predictable.
    • sgarland 8mo ago
      If you think Postgres has idiosyncrasies… https://sqlite.org/quirks.html https://sqlite.org/quirks.html
      • NuclearPM 8mo ago
        Which one is an issue?
        • direwolf20 8mo ago
          No types, no foreign key enforcement, double–quoted string literals
        • sgarland 7mo ago
          NUL in the middle of a string is fine, types have no meaning, VARCHAR limits are just suggestions… The flexible typing is the biggest WTF to me, especially because it necessitates insane affinity rules[0]. For example, you can declare that a column is of type “CHARINT” (or “VARCHARINT”, for that matter), and while that will match the rule for TEXT affinity (contains the string “CHAR”), it also matches the rule for INTEGER affinity (contains the string “INT”), and since that rule matches first, the column is given INTEGER affinity. "FLOATING POINT" maps to INTEGER since it ends in "INT", and "STRING" maps to NUMERIC since it doesn't match anything else. Then there are the comparison rules (same link). NULL < NULL, INTEGER || REAL < TEXT < BLOB - but those may be altered at comparison time due to type conversion. Hex values as strings get coerced to 0 as INTEGER, but only if they're in the SQL text, not if they're stored in a table. Finally, no conversion takes place for ORDER BY operations. This is particularly galling considering that most of sqlite3's display types (this is `markdown`) don't visually differentiate between string-types and numeric-types - I manually added the strings on rows (by PK) 2 and 4 to assist the explanation. sqlite> CREATE TABLE foobar (id INTEGER NOT NULL PRIMARY KEY, b BLOB NOT NULL); sqlite> INSERT INTO foobar (b) VALUES (10), ('10'), (0xA), ('0xA'); sqlite> SELECT id, b, 15 > b, '15' > b, 0xF > b, '0xF' > b FROM foobar ORDER BY b; | id | b | 15 > b | '15' > b | 0xF > b | '0xF' > b | |----|----- |--------|----------|---------|-----------| | 1 | 10 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | | 3 | 10 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | | 4 | '0xA' | 0 | 1 | 0 | 1 | | 2 | '10' | 0 | 1 | 0 | 0 | SQLite is great, if and only if you use STRICT mode (and enable FK checks, if applicable). Otherwise, best of luck. 0: https://sqlite.org/datatype3.html https://sqlite.org/datatype3.html
• deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]
• dzonga 8mo ago
  See my Comment on why hybrid db's like tigerDB(data) are good - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46876037 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46876037
• pyrolistical 8mo ago
  Just use sqlite until you can’t. Then use Postgres until you can’t.
  • riku_iki 7mo ago
    2 database migrations could be a huge effort.
• fitsumbelay 8mo ago
  fair points made but I use sqlite for many things because sometimes you just need a tent
• rappatic 8mo ago
  Oh wow, the "Postgres for Developers, Devices, and Agents" company wants us to use Postgres?
  • j45 8mo ago
    Postgres has its merits without the company who's also enjoying using it.
• j45 8mo ago
  I find myself needing to start something quickly with a bit of login and data/user management. Postgres won as the starting point again thanks to Supabase.
• zikani_03 8mo ago
  Postgres can definitely handle a lot of use cases; background job scheduling always had me tempted to reach for something like rabbitmq but so far happy enough with riverqueue[0] for Go projects. [0]: https://riverqueue.com/ https://riverqueue.com/
• quotemstr 8mo ago
  Only if DuckDB is an acceptable value of PostgreSQL. I agree that PostgreSQL has eaten many DB use-cases, but the breathless hype is becoming exhausting. Look. In a PostgreSQL extension, I can't: 1. extend the SQL language with ergonomic syntax for my use-case, 2. teach the query planner to understand execution strategies that can't be made to look PostgreSQL's tuple-and-index execution model, or 3. extend the type system to plumb new kinds of metadata through the whole query and storage system via some extensible IR. (Plus, embedded PostgreSQL still isn't a first class thing.) Until PostgreSQL's extension mechanism is powerful enough for me to literally implement DuckDB as an extension, PostgreSQL is not a panacea. It's a good system, but nowhere near universal. Now, once I can do DuckDB (including its language extensions) in PostgreSQL, and once I can use the thing as a library, let's talk. (pg_duckdb doesn't count. It's a switch, not a unified engine.)
• storus 8mo ago
  Pinecone allows hybrid search, merging dense and sparse vector embeddings that Postgres can't do AFAIK. That results in ~10% worse retrieval scores which might be the difference between making it in the business or not.
  • CharlieDigital 8mo ago
    The lesson for me isn't "don't use Pinecone", but more like "did you already max out Postgres?" In many cases, it is going to save you time by having less infra and one less risk while you're getting started. And if you find yourself outgrowing the capabilities of Pg then you look for an alternative.
  • RevEng 8mo ago
    The article shows an example of hybrid search using RRF.
    • storus 8mo ago
      With BM25 which has a far worse/non-generalizable performance than sparse embeddings Pinecone supports. Moreover you get a latency hit from RRF that makes it challenging to use for e.g. real-time multimodal chat agents.
• tschellenbach 8mo ago
  postgres is great, but its not great at sharding tables.
• the_arun 8mo ago
  I am looking for a db that runs using existing json/yaml/csv files, saves data back to those files in a directory, which I can sync using Dropbox or whatever shared storage. Now I can run this db wherever I am & run the application. Postgres feels a bit more for my needs
  • TheRealPomax 8mo ago
    Why? Why would separate json/yaml/csv files be better than just... syncing using postgres itself? You point `psql` to the host you need, because clearly you have internet access even on the go, and done: you don't need to sync anything, you already have remote access to the database?
    • the_arun 7mo ago
      I have internet doesn’t mean I have access to DB. For eg. I don’t want to open my DB for public access.
  • realslimjd 8mo ago
    It feels like you want SQLite?
  • duckmysick 7mo ago
    SQLite or DuckDB if your needs are more analytical than transactional.
• avmich 8mo ago
  I have two fundamental problems with Postgres - an excellent piece of technology, no questions about that. First, to use Postgres for all those cases you have to learn various aspects of Postgres. Postgres isn't a unified tool which can do everything - instead it's a set of tools under the same umbrella. As a result, you don't save much from similarly learning all those different systems and using Postgres only as a RDBMS. And if something isn't implemented in Postgres better than in a 3rd party system, it could be easier to replace that 3rd party system - just one part of the system - rather than switching from Postgres-only to Postgres-and-then-some. In other words, Postgres has little benefits when many technologies are needed comparing with the collection of separate tools. The article notwithstanding. Second, Postgres is written for HDDs - hard disk drives, with their patterns of data access and times. Today we usually work with SSDs, and we'd benefit from having SSD-native RDBMSes. They exist, and Postgres may lose to them - both in simplicity and performance - significantly enough. Still, Postgres is pretty good, yes.
  • sbayeta 8mo ago
    Never heard about postgresql being written for hdds. Could you provide a source?
    • avmich 8mo ago
      Well, take a look at the dates of when Postgres was created and when SSDs become available. Better, find articles about internal algorithms, B-trees, times of operations like seeks etc. The Postgres was initially written with disk operation timings in mind, and the point is that's changing - and I haven't heard of Postgres architecture changing with that.
      • phanimahesh 8mo ago
        Can you share examples of new database architectures and products using them that are built for SSDs? I'm sure we have different capabilities and constraints, but I am unaware of any fundamentally different approaches to indexes.
• vagab0nd 8mo ago
  I recently started digging into databases for the first time since college, and from a novice's perspective, postgres is absolutely magical. You can throw in 10M+ rows across twenty columns, spread over five tables, add some indices, and get sub-100ms queries for virtually anything you want. If something doesn't work, you just ask it for an analysis and immediately know what index to add or how to fix your query. It blows my mind. Modern databases are miracles.
  • deleted 8mo ago
    [deleted]
  • on_the_train 7mo ago
    My perspective might be equally naive as I've rarely had contact with databases in my professional life, but 100ms sounds like an absolutely mental timeframe (in a bad way)
  • teraflop 8mo ago
    I don't mean this as a knock on you, but your comment is a bit funny to me because it has very little to do with "modern" databases. What you're describing would probably have been equally possible with Postgres from 20 years ago, running on an average desktop PC from 20 years ago. (Or maybe even with SQLite from 20 years ago, for that matter.) Don't get me wrong, Postgres has gotten a lot better since 2006. But most of the improvements have been in terms of more advanced query functionality, or optimizations for those advanced queries, or administration/operational features (e.g. replication, backups, security).
    • BeetleB 8mo ago
      [flagged]
    • kccqzy 8mo ago
      The article actually points out a number of things only added after 2006, such as full-text search, JSONB, etc. Twenty years ago your full-text search option is just LIKE '%keyword%'. And it would be both slower than less effective than real full-text search. It clearly wasn’t “sub-100ms queries for virtually anything you want” like GP said.
• kai_arch_2026 8mo ago
  [dead]
• JoshPurtell 8mo ago
  It's 2026, just use Planetscale Postgres
• nubg 8mo ago
  I think it's disgenious by the author to publish this article heavily edited by AI and not disclose it.
• anonzzzies 8mo ago
  It's 20xx just use sqlite. Almost no-one needs all that power; they sure do think they do, but really don't. And will never. SQLite + Duck is all you need even with a million visitors; when you need failover and scaling you need more, but that is a tiny fraction of all companies.
  • crazygringo 8mo ago
    Huh? SQLite is designed for application databases. Postgres is designed for client-server. It's not about "power" (what does that even mean?), it's about totally different design choices that are intended for different purposes. It's an architecture question, not a "power" or "visitors" question.
    • anonzzzies 8mo ago
      We run plenty of money making SaaS on sqlite without issues. And have been for over a decade. By power I meant all the complex features postgres has. But yes, it's an architecture question; my point being, most people pick many bulldozers while they need a 1 shovel.
      • crazygringo 7mo ago
        > But yes, it's an architecture question; my point being, most people pick many bulldozers while they need a 1 shovel. Again, huh? Client-server vs locally embedded does not map to "many bulldozers vs 1 shovel". SQLite and Postgres aren't even really competitors. They serve extremely different use cases. I'm not aware that "most" people are picking Postgres when they "need" SQLite. What are you even basing this on? SQLite is already an extremely popular choice.
      • riku_iki 7mo ago
        how did you handle HA/replication story with sqlite?
    • casey2 8mo ago
      I'm glad we agree that "just use postgres" is horrible advice. Would you except "Just use postgres for client-server" as a reasonable change?
• johnfn 8mo ago
  This is just AI slop. The best tell is how much AI loves tables. Look at "The Hidden Costs Add Up", where it literally just repeats "1" in the second column and "7" in the third column. No human would ever write a table like that.
  • rendang 8mo ago
    Agree. Very unprofessional and disrespectful to prospective customers to not even have a human edit your blog copy
• tempestn 8mo ago
  It really depends on your use case, doesn't it? I'd say, just use Postgres... until you have a reason not to. We used finally switched to Elasticsearch to power user search queries of our vehicle listings a few years ago, and found its speed, capabilities, and simplicity all significant improvements compared to the MariaDB-based search we'd been using previously. (Postgres's search features are likely better than MariaDB's, but I expect the comparison holds.) But that's the core of our product, and while not giant, our scale is significant. If you're just doing some basic search, you don't need it. (We managed for many years just fine without.) I've never really regretted waiting to move to a new tool, if we already had something that works. Usually by doing so you can wait for the fads to die down and for something to become the de facto standard, which tends to save a lot of time and effort. But sometimes you can in fact get value out of a specialized tool, and then you might as well use it. Huh, apparently this is controversial, based on the score ping-ponging up and down! I'm not really sure why though. Is it because of the reference to MariaDB?
• Olshansky 8mo ago
  https://github.com/Olshansk/postgres_for_everything/ https://github.com/Olshansk/postgres_for_everything/
• wxw 8mo ago
  This reads like AI generated slop, though the point about simplicity is valid.
• cies 8mo ago
  No more ORMs, not even query builders, ... When it comes to Postgres I want to write the sql myself! There is so much value. Supabase helps when building a webapp. But Postgres is the powerhouse.
• nikisweeting 8mo ago
  I really wish I could but it's hard to embed in local-first apps and packages without forcing users to set up docker. PGlite would be perfect if only it allowed multiple writer connections. SQLite is ok but I want PG extensions and I want true parallel multi-writer support!
• worik 8mo ago
  I like PostgreSQL. If I am storing relational data I use it. But for non relational data, I prefer something simpler depending on what the requirements are. Commenters here are talking "modern tools" and complex systems. But I am thinking of common simpler cases where I have seen so many people reach for a relational database from habit. For large data sets there are plenty of key/value stores to choose from, for small (less than a mega byte) data then a CSV file will often work best. Scanning is quicker than indexing for surprisingly large data sets. And so much simpler
• jb3689 8mo ago
  It irks me that these "just use Postgres" posts only talk about feature sets with no discussion about operations, reliability, real scaling, or even just guard rails and opinions to deter you from making bad design decisions. The author writes about how three nine's is multiplied over several dependencies, but that's not how this shakes out in practice. Your relational database is typically far more vulnerable than distributed alternatives. "Just use Postgres" is fine advice but gets used as a crutch by companies who wind up building everything in-house for no good reason.
• _pdp_ 8mo ago
  Timely!
• mhh__ 8mo ago
  I like "just use postgres" but postgres is getting a bit long in the tooth in some ways, so I'm pretty helpful that CedarDb sticks the landing. https://cedardb.com/ https://cedardb.com/ I suspect it not being open source may prevent a certain level of proliferation unfortunately.
• kachapopopow 8mo ago
  and if you think it doesn't fit your suitcase? just add an extension and you're good to go (ex: timescaledb)
• exabrial 8mo ago
  The real problem is, I'm so danged familiar with the MySQL toolset. I've fixed absolutely terrifying replication issues, include a monster split brain where we had to hand pick off transactions and replay them against the new master. We've written a binlog parsing as an event source to clear application caching. I can talk to you about how locking works, when it doesn't (phantom locks anyone?), how events work (and will fail) and many other things I never set out to learn but just sort of had to. While I'd love to "just use Postgres" I feel the tool you know is perhaps the better choice. From the fandom online, it's overall probably the better DBMS, but I would just be useless in a Postgres world right now. Sorta strapped my saddle to the wrong start unfortunately.
  • mixmastamyk 8mo ago
    Start learning on the side. Know one well, the time to learn another is much shorter. Bet you could be well on your way in just a few weeks. Not to mention getting away from the Oracle stink.
• 10g1k 8mo ago
  KISS.
• keyshapegeo99 8mo ago
  Can I just say, I'm getting really sick of these LLM-generated posts clogging up this site? GPTZero gives this a 95% chance of being entirely AI-generated. (5% human-AI mix, and 0% completely original.) But I could tell you that just by using my eyes, the tells are so obvious. "The myth / The reality, etc." If I wanted to know what ChatGPT had to say about something, I would ask ChatGPT. That's not what I come here for, and I think the same applies to most others. Here's an idea for all you entrepreneur types: devise a privacy-preserving, local-running browser extension for scanning all content that a user encounters in their browser - and changing the browser extension icon to warn of an AI generated article or social media post or whatever. So that I do not have to waste a further second interacting with it. I would genuinely pay a hefty subscription fee for such a service at this point, provided it worked well.
• getnormality 8mo ago
  How does Postgres stack up against columnar databases like Vertica and DuckDB for analytical queries?
  • direwolf20 8mo ago
    Not great. It works but the performance isn't ideal for this case. Still the advice is sound. You can build a new analytics system when you're doing enough analytical queries on enough data to bog down the primary system.
• esafak 8mo ago
  The only thing postgres lacks is a distributed option.
• deeviant 8mo ago
  I have problem pulled out postgres 10 or more times for various projects at work. Each time I had to fight for it, each time I won, it did absolute everything I needed it to do and did it well.
• Kuyawa 8mo ago
  > Over 48,000 companies use PostgreSQL, including Netflix, Spotify, Uber, Reddit, Instagram, and Discord. I hope all of them donate to the PostgreSQL community in the same amount they benefit from it https://www.postgresql.org/about/donate/ https://www.postgresql.org/about/donate/
• ropable 8mo ago
  I have a colleague who (inexplicably) doesn't trust Postgres for "high performance" applications. He needed a database of shared state for a variable number of running containers to manage a queue, so he decided to implement his own bespoke file-based database, using shared disk. Lo and behold, during the first big (well-anticipated) high-demand event, that system absolutely crawled. It ran, but it was a total bottleneck during two days of high demand. I, who has made a New Years resolution to no longer spend political capital on things that I can't change, looked on with a keen degree of schadenfreude. Just. Use. Postgres.
• krick 8mo ago
  No, seriously, people need to be punished for submitting LLM-generated garbage without specifying that it's LLM-generated garbage. 400+ points, oh my god, people, what's wrong with you...
  • xyst 8mo ago
    and it’s up voted 400+ on hn. This place has truly lost its way.
    • rglynn 8mo ago
      I mean to be fair, "Just use Postgres" will get 400 votes here without people even clicking TFA.
  • ronbenton 8mo ago
    I just pasted the first paragraph in an "AI detector" app and it indeed came back as 100% AI. But I heard those things are unreliable. How did you determine this was LLM-generated? The same way?
    • willidiots 8mo ago
      Just using LLMs enough I've developed a sense for the flavor of writing. Surely it could be hidden with enough work, but most of the time it's pretty blatant.
      • ronbenton 8mo ago
        Sometimes I get an "uncanny valley" vibe when reading AI-generated text. It can be pretty unnerving.
    • delish 8mo ago
      Apart from the style of the prose, which is my subjective evaluation: This blog post is "a view from nowhere." Tiger Data is a company that sells postgres in some way (don't know, but it doesn't matter for the following): they could speak as themselves, and compare themselves to companies that sell other open source databases. Or they could showcase benchmarks _they ran_. Them saying: "What you get: pgvectorscale uses the DiskANN algorithm (from Microsoft Research), achieving 28x lower p95 latency and 16x higher throughput than Pinecone at 99% recall" is marketing unless they give how you'd replicate those numbers. Point being: this could have been written by an LLM, because it doesn't represent any work-done by Tiger Data.
• xyst 8mo ago
  "juSt use PoStGreS" is spoken like a true C-level with no experience on the ground with postgres itself or its spin offs. yes pg is awesome and it’s my go to for relational databases. But the reason why mongo or influx db exists is because they excel in those areas. I would use pg for timeseries for small use cases, testing. But scaling pg for production time series workloads is not worth it. You end up fighting the technology to get it to work just because some lame person wanted to simplify ops
• idgafayd 8mo ago
  [dead]
• amarant 8mo ago
  Meh, it's 2026! Unless you're Google, you should probably just pipe all your data to /dev/null (way faster than postgres!) and then have a LLM infer the results of any get requests
• knorke 7mo ago
  the index bloat problem is still not solved.
• hnarn 7mo ago
  I’m going to be that guy and point out that in my opinion, this article stinks of LLM. For example, this header and introductory sentence: > Why This Matters Now: The AI Era > This isn’t just about simplicity. AI agents have made database sprawl a nightmare. or: > “But Specialized Databases Are Better!” > Let’s address this head-on. I agree with your point, Raja, but if I wanted an LLMs take on it, I’d ask an LLM.
• johnwatson11218 7mo ago
  I'm using postgres as part of my current project - https://github.com/johnwatson11218/LatentTopicExplorer https://github.com/johnwatson11218/LatentTopicExplorer I had added Spacey to my codebase for one of its features and found that just doing the work in the db was near instant and my containers would not run out of ram. I want to get back to Spacey for more involved nlp work but right now the db "just works". I think Oracle is nicer but postgres does what I need for a lot less money! https://github.com/johnwatson11218/LatentTopicExplorer/commit/a32bbbcb406f8688e0908e7acdc8b6c88a6cce25 https://github.com/johnwatson11218/LatentTopicExplorer/commi...
• jayannluceno65 7mo ago
  [dead]