Choose Boring Technology

Re:Choose Boring Technology by lmm on Monday October 02, 2023 @12:04AM (#37733859)

He writes all this philosophy and then concludes with using PostgreSQL instead of mongoDB or nodeJS (? I'm not sure how that was in the same category). PostgreSQL is the opposite of boring technology; I've been using it for over 10 years and am still discovering new and surprising features with new and surprising failure modes; PostgreSQL today is very different from PostgreSQL 10 years ago, but setting it up for true master-master replication is still a clusterfuck and you still have zillions of moving parts in real world use.

I'm lead inevitably to the conclusion that philosophising about tech choices and principles is pointless. Everyone will nod and agree with the principles and tradeoffs and then pick their personal pet technology anyway.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Choose Boring Technology by gaganyaan on Monday October 02, 2023 @12:10AM (#37733899)

You're kind of missing the point, unless you're saying that regular PostgreSQL also has interesting failure modes. PostgreSQL clustering may not be boring technology, but that just means you scale up instead of out. If you run out of headroom for scaling up, that probably means you're successful enough that you can take a look at non-boring technology.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Choose Boring Technology by ksec on Monday October 02, 2023 @12:20AM (#37733959)

I would have thought MySQL would be a better fit for boring technology.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Choose Boring Technology by gaganyaan on Monday October 02, 2023 @12:27AM (#37733992)

Given that the author compared MongoDB vs PostgreSQL, I think the technology in question is SQL vs NoSQL, not a particular flavor of SQL vs the other.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Choose Boring Technology by kyawzazaw on Monday October 02, 2023 @12:16AM (#37733942)

doesn't that mean you are now ready for a new innovation token, which is inline with the written philosophy?

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Choose Boring Technology by simonw on Monday October 02, 2023 @12:43AM (#37734079)

PostgreSQL is absolutely boring technology.

What makes it boring is:

- people have been using it for decades, for all kinds of different things

- this means that any problem you run into, someone else will have seen before - and will have talked about it online

- you're not going to be using it to solve a class of problems that no one else has used it for before

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Choose Boring Technology by threeseed on Monday October 02, 2023 @01:02AM (#37734182)

There are many aspects of PostgreSQL which are not solved problems e.g. clustering, replication, high-availability. And will remain unsolved whilst they are not part of the core products. Because everyone comes up with different solutions which change over time.

Citus Data which people often recommended didn't exist prior to 2010 and may not exist next year now they've been acquired by Microsoft and conflict with their Azure business.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Choose Boring Technology by simonw on Monday October 02, 2023 @01:28AM (#37734321)

Clustering, replication and high availability may not be easy, but there are thousands of production PostgreSQL instances out there have solved them. That's what makes it boring.

Compare solving those problems to solving them with a brand new database engine where you might be one of the first organizations to run at that scale.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Choose Boring Technology by threeseed on Monday October 02, 2023 @01:57AM (#37734458)

> but there are thousands of production PostgreSQL instances out there have solved them

Great. Can you provide the details on exactly how they did that. Ensuring of course that it doesn't rely on anything proprietary e.g. Citus.

Because with every other database I can just go to the officially supported and maintained documentation.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Choose Boring Technology by simonw on Monday October 02, 2023 @10:38AM (#37738731)

OK, you've attracted my interest. What are some examples of official database documentation pages that do a great job of covering these advanced deployment topics?

It's important to note that "boring technology" doesn't mean the official documentation will answer all of your questions: it means that there is enough experience out there in the user community that you can find the information if you go looking for it.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Choose Boring Technology by lmm on Monday October 02, 2023 @10:18PM (#37747141)

How is it an "advanced" topic? Having multiple instances so that you don't have a SPOF is table stakes for any service you care about, and something any half-serious datastore like Cassandra, Kafka or even MongoDB (for all of which "clustering, replication and high availability" are boring things that you would naturally set up without making a fuss about it) will do out of the box. I'm constantly baffled that when it comes to RDBMSes people suddenly decide that single points of failure are fine now actually.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Choose Boring Technology by djur on Monday October 02, 2023 @12:50AM (#37734122)

The essay was written in early 2015 and you can further interpret the author's idea of "boring" versus "innovative" technologies through the lens of what they were using at Etsy from 2007-2014 (NodeJS was initially released in 2009).

[ Parent | on HN ]