[HN Gopher] Unfinished Business with Postgres ___________________________________________________________________ Unfinished Business with Postgres Author : ctoth Score : 94 points Date : 2022-05-18 17:04 UTC (5 hours ago) (HTM) web link (www.craigkerstiens.com) (TXT) w3m dump (www.craigkerstiens.com) | brightball wrote: | Quite a journey Craig and really funny to see how Heroku ended up | with PostgreSQL. In my estimation, that decision is one of the | biggest factors in the growth of PG adoption everywhere over the | last decade. What a butterfly effect for that engineer chiming | in. | | Dataclips really was a great feature. We were using it for all of | our internal dashboards at the company where I worked in 2013. | One of our support staff even learned SQL due to interacting with | it and went on to get a CS degree a few years later. | pjungwir wrote: | Thank you for writing this bit of history, Craig! I have a | personal half-serious theory that it was Heroku that really gave | Postgres its break-through popularity. I think life is often like | that: after years & years of hard work, you get just the right | coincidence of external factors to let you take off. All during | the 'oughts Postgres seemed like an eccentric ideological choice | over MySQL, but most of us had never really tried it. With Heroku | we were basically forced to use it, and suddenly we could see | that all those eccentrics were right. I love Postgres and have | tried to make it more & more a part of my own career. So thank | you to you and the Heroku team for making such a principled and | brave choice back then. | brightball wrote: | I agree with you. Heroku PG was the driver for RDS PG from what | I saw. People were using it without having any idea why, just | because it was what Heroku had available. | | At the same time, a lot of people kept trying to just use it as | a dumb data store like MySQL without realizing exactly how much | you could do with it. 90% of the time you don't need a | dedicated search engine syncing and all the headaches that come | with it, for example. | Octoth0rpe wrote: | I don't think that's a bad theory, but I'd point more towards | three particular events as critical: | | 1. Postgres 7 supporting windows (I _think_ 7 was the first). | That brought a ton of users into the community | | 2. Oracle's acquisition of mysql, and subsequent forking. That | caused a lot of people to look around for other solutions | | 3. Amazon RDS | alphabettsy wrote: | > 2. Oracle's acquisition of mysql, and subsequent forking. | That caused a lot of people to look around for other | solutions | | It was this one for me. | avereveard wrote: | 4 oracle changing licensing to be more hostile toward | virtualization, right around at VMware peak | [deleted] | i_like_waiting wrote: | Indeed, heroku was first time that I used postgres, or | databases in project really. | retcon wrote: | >near miss when a disk was lost that caused a rather horrific | amount of effort and some nailbiting in restoring from | pgbackups." | | I hope that eliminating a single drive fault failure mode isn't | part of the unfinished business. | | Twelve years ago RAID 6 and 60 definitely existed. Battery backed | FC arrays of considerable sophistication have existed for far | longer. I'm thinking HDS arrays circa 2002 for peak redundancy | complexity (before integration reduced parts and physical runtime | concerns making the installation environment as important as the | technology.) | fdr wrote: | EBS has always been RAID. You need more. | djbusby wrote: | One time, me, a noob, accidentally deleted files in the PG data | directory. No noe! But PG had open handles to them so they | aren't reclaimed by the FS and I was able to pg_dump. Not a | production system but the loss would've been "big". Just | saying, PG itself is very resilient. | lelanthran wrote: | > One time, me, a noob, accidentally deleted files in the PG | data directory. No noe! But PG had open handles to them so | they aren't reclaimed by the FS and I was able to pg_dump. | Not a production system but the loss would've been "big". | Just saying, PG itself is very resilient. | | That isn't a PG thing; Linux[1] ext3/4 does not actually | delete files (or directories) that are still in use. Only the | name is removed. The file itself remains until the last open | handle to it is closed. | | [1] Amongst other OSes | gjvc wrote: | if you'd read the previous post carefully, you'd have seen | they said that | deltarholamda wrote: | >As an early PM I first worked on billing | | And then moved on to scalable RDBMS for a PaaS. | | It's like a fairy tale, but one of the Grimm Bros. ones, not | Disney. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-05-18 23:00 UTC)