[HN Gopher] Unfinished Business with Postgres
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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.
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