I love Postgres, and I agree with the general sentiment. But I read the (growing) genre of "use Postgres for everything" articles and they imply a difficulty in running other software that I just don't see.
I'm thinking of Redis in particular. If you're using it as incredibly fast but not critical storage, it's trivial to set up and it ~never crashes or requires maintenance. It creates no headaches, and in exchange gives me a k/v store that I can thrash without worrying about performance (I know it's fast), downstream impact (am I slowing down critical-path SQL queries), etc. Especially in the age of LLMs, which I've found to be great at devops-type tasks, I feel slightly less compelled to simplify my stack.
Are the various plugins easier to set up, configure, troubleshoot, etc. than the other software options? If I'm paged awake at 2am, will I have an easier time figuring out pgmq than I will RabbitMQ?
I have yet to have used UNLOGGED table in production, but I really want to try at some point. Anybody actually replaced a large Redis instance with this?
Couple that with a framework with decent server side rendered template support and htmx for network based interactions and you’ve got 90% of the <acronym_of_the_moment> stack with 10% of the complexity.
> This isn't about dogma. Sometimes you genuinely need specialized infrastructure. But the bar should be high: only after pushing Postgres to its limits, documenting why it was insufficient, and accepting the operational cost of the alternative.
I've seen a few "Use Postgres for Everything!" posts lately. It seems to be fashionable. It reminds me of the Choose Boring Technology[1] thing from 2018 or so, but more specific to a database.
I think the ideas of "don't add unnecessary dependencies" and "ruthlessly evaluate tradeoffs" and "prefer simplicity" and so on are general and have very little to with postgres, so when I see things like "All you need is X" I roll my eyes a little, because these decisions are highly dependent on your use case, and taken as blanket advice it is generally _bad_ advice even if the underlying rationale is sound.
ETA: I am going through their list and so much of this means that you are going to manage your own PG cluster and not take advantage of Aurora or RDS, which means you're already committing to a major tradeoff if you want to use a lot of these custom extensions.
Love FerretDB, but it doesn't really replace MongoDB's GridFS which is main reason why most people who are really using Mongo now day. Anyone knows a good replacement for GridFS?
Why would anyone use GridFS for any serious use case? It costs 10-20x as much as storing the files on S3. If unless you already have all your data in MongoDB and don't want an additional dependency for a small number of files it makes sense, but it definitely is not a case for using MongoDB by itself.
... and unlike all the new databases, Postgres has a decent license. Everybody else is so afraid of being co-opted by AWS that they won't let you run them the way the way you want.
Is there something specific you wanted to do that was prohibited by a license. I thought most of the licenses you’re talking about just prohibited you from reselling the database as a service.
I love Postgres, and I agree with the general sentiment. But I read the (growing) genre of "use Postgres for everything" articles and they imply a difficulty in running other software that I just don't see.
I'm thinking of Redis in particular. If you're using it as incredibly fast but not critical storage, it's trivial to set up and it ~never crashes or requires maintenance. It creates no headaches, and in exchange gives me a k/v store that I can thrash without worrying about performance (I know it's fast), downstream impact (am I slowing down critical-path SQL queries), etc. Especially in the age of LLMs, which I've found to be great at devops-type tasks, I feel slightly less compelled to simplify my stack.
Are the various plugins easier to set up, configure, troubleshoot, etc. than the other software options? If I'm paged awake at 2am, will I have an easier time figuring out pgmq than I will RabbitMQ?
I have yet to have used UNLOGGED table in production, but I really want to try at some point. Anybody actually replaced a large Redis instance with this?
Couple that with a framework with decent server side rendered template support and htmx for network based interactions and you’ve got 90% of the <acronym_of_the_moment> stack with 10% of the complexity.
> This isn't about dogma. Sometimes you genuinely need specialized infrastructure. But the bar should be high: only after pushing Postgres to its limits, documenting why it was insufficient, and accepting the operational cost of the alternative.
I've seen a few "Use Postgres for Everything!" posts lately. It seems to be fashionable. It reminds me of the Choose Boring Technology[1] thing from 2018 or so, but more specific to a database.
I think the ideas of "don't add unnecessary dependencies" and "ruthlessly evaluate tradeoffs" and "prefer simplicity" and so on are general and have very little to with postgres, so when I see things like "All you need is X" I roll my eyes a little, because these decisions are highly dependent on your use case, and taken as blanket advice it is generally _bad_ advice even if the underlying rationale is sound.
[1]: https://mcfunley.com/choose-boring-technology
ETA: I am going through their list and so much of this means that you are going to manage your own PG cluster and not take advantage of Aurora or RDS, which means you're already committing to a major tradeoff if you want to use a lot of these custom extensions.
agree:
https://github.com/seanwevans/pg_os
https://github.com/seanwevans/pg_git
https://github.com/seanwevans/pg_gpt2
etc...
https://thombrown.blogspot.com/2026/07/load-plcbmbasic81-com...
> Document store -> FerretDB
Love FerretDB, but it doesn't really replace MongoDB's GridFS which is main reason why most people who are really using Mongo now day. Anyone knows a good replacement for GridFS?
Why would anyone use GridFS for any serious use case? It costs 10-20x as much as storing the files on S3. If unless you already have all your data in MongoDB and don't want an additional dependency for a small number of files it makes sense, but it definitely is not a case for using MongoDB by itself.
what about for blob storage too?
Reminds me Kai Lentit's ffmpeg video
https://youtu.be/9kaIXkImCAM
... and unlike all the new databases, Postgres has a decent license. Everybody else is so afraid of being co-opted by AWS that they won't let you run them the way the way you want.
Is there something specific you wanted to do that was prohibited by a license. I thought most of the licenses you’re talking about just prohibited you from reselling the database as a service.