Re:RethinkDB versus PostgreSQL: my personal experience
by webmaven on Sunday February 12, 2017 @12:33PM
(#13629399)
> Yet somehow, we continue to see PostgreSQL beating Mongo, Rethink, and other trendy "NoSQL" upstarts at performance, one of the primary advantages they're supposed to have over it.
Yeah, pg will beat the pants off of pretty much any NOSQL DB on a single node, but what happens when you need master-master replication of sharded data in each datacenter as well as between datacenters?
Sure, denormalize and enforce data integrity at the application layer, shard the data, use queues for data updates to ensure every data-center gets all the data (eventually), and so on.
Now you're essentially treating the RDBMS as an eventually consistent NOSQL data store, horizontal scaling within a DC is still going to be annoying once you can't scale the shards vertically anymore, interruptions of network connectivity (or just increased latency) between DCs create huge headaches, and the (right) NOSQL DBs will beat the pants off of it for an equivalent hardware or hosting budget.
That said, NOSQL datastores solve problems that your startup will only encounter once you achieve product-market fit and enter a hypergrowth phase. Your MVP does not need an eventually-consistent distributed NOSQL backend, dammit.
Heck, your MVP may not even need PostGres or MySQL either. Just use SQLite, back up your server, and redeploy on pg only when (if) you start getting some traction.
Yeah, pg will beat the pants off of pretty much any NOSQL DB on a single node, but what happens when you need master-master replication of sharded data in each datacenter as well as between datacenters?
Sure, denormalize and enforce data integrity at the application layer, shard the data, use queues for data updates to ensure every data-center gets all the data (eventually), and so on.
Now you're essentially treating the RDBMS as an eventually consistent NOSQL data store, horizontal scaling within a DC is still going to be annoying once you can't scale the shards vertically anymore, interruptions of network connectivity (or just increased latency) between DCs create huge headaches, and the (right) NOSQL DBs will beat the pants off of it for an equivalent hardware or hosting budget.
That said, NOSQL datastores solve problems that your startup will only encounter once you achieve product-market fit and enter a hypergrowth phase. Your MVP does not need an eventually-consistent distributed NOSQL backend, dammit.
Heck, your MVP may not even need PostGres or MySQL either. Just use SQLite, back up your server, and redeploy on pg only when (if) you start getting some traction.