News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on In Praise of PostgreSQL. Parent comment

Re:In Praise of PostgreSQL by indymike on Thursday August 05, 2021 @02:40PM (#28077763)
MySQL and MariaDB are REALLY great software. The real difference is not one of quality (both are proven performers, and both have survived the test of time, both are used at scale by some pretty giant customers), it is one of quantity. Postgres simply has more features by a pretty wide margin than does MySQL. For many DBAs and developers, Postgres is a more flexible choice due to the additional capability.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:In Praise of PostgreSQL by Tostino on Thursday August 05, 2021 @02:43PM (#28077820)
I love me some partial indexes, exclusion constraints, range types, etc... Not even mentioning the GIS capability.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:In Praise of PostgreSQL by sam_goody on Friday August 06, 2021 @04:30AM (#28084581)
And trigrams! Both have "Full Text Search", but Postgre's is more complete.

In general, Postgres also seems to have better plugins and extensions

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:In Praise of PostgreSQL by threeseed on Thursday August 05, 2021 @03:39PM (#28078505)
> Postgres simply has more features

And yet lacks the most important one. A natively supported clustering and HA solution.

Especially important with CitusData being acquired by Microsoft and its future now at risk.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:In Praise of PostgreSQL by Twisell on Thursday August 05, 2021 @05:44PM (#28080339)
Ahem there is also https://repmgr.org

An actively developed FOSS solution backed by EnterpriseDB also one of the main company supporting PostgreSQL.

But err... And ahem ahem... there are more https://www.postgresql.org/download/products/3-clusteringrep...

It's a choice of the PostgreSQL development team to only include low level api for HA in core project. But it's fairly harsh to say there is no active support for HA. Many maintainers of the core are also invested in HA related project build around PostgreSQL.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:In Praise of PostgreSQL by threeseed on Thursday August 05, 2021 @09:23PM (#28082217)
Natively supported means part of the core product.

Dealing with third party solutions means having to worry about incompatibility, enterprise support, ongoing maintenance etc.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:In Praise of PostgreSQL by Twisell on Friday August 06, 2021 @05:26AM (#28084923)
Not being in part of core mean multiple solutions to fit different needs. Also a lot of people don't really need HA so it keep core feature more focused. (Again HA is supported at low level, you could totally achieve HA without third party, it just require more internal ressources)

There are a lot of companies out there which provide enterprise support for PostgreSQL + HA.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:In Praise of PostgreSQL by whitepoplar on Thursday August 05, 2021 @03:54PM (#28078765)
pg_auto_failover is pretty great.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:In Praise of PostgreSQL by threeseed on Thursday August 05, 2021 @03:58PM (#28078816)
a) It's maintained by CitusData which was acquired by Microsoft and so is now both unsupported and based on history at risk of being unmaintained.

b) Is not part of the core PostgreSQL codebase and so you are forever having to worry about compatibility.

c) PostgreSQL still lacks multi-master HA which is needed when you want to HA but continue to scale out.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:In Praise of PostgreSQL by whitepoplar on Thursday August 05, 2021 @04:30PM (#28079313)
FWIW, pg_auto_failover was released post-acquisition and is most certainly not unsupported; it's actively developed and new feature releases have been solid. It would be nice for this functionality to be built into Postgres, though.
[ Parent | on HN ]