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264 points davidgomes | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
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paulryanrogers ◴[] No.41875055[source]
Upgrades are hard. There was no replication in the before times. The original block-level replication didn't work among different major versions. Slony was a painful workaround based on triggers that amplified writes.

Newer PostgreSQL versions are better. Yet still not quite as robust or easy as MySQL.

At a certain scale even MySQL upgrades can be painful. At least when you cannot spare more than a few minutes of downtime.

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api ◴[] No.41875126[source]
I've always wondered why Postgres is so insanely popular. I mean it has some nice things like very powerful support for a very comprehensive subset of SQL functionality, but most apps don't need all that.

It really feels like early 1990s vintage Unix software. It's clunky and arcane and it's hard to feel confident doing anything complex with it.

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tpmoney ◴[] No.41875306[source]
> I've always wondered why Postgres is so insanely popular.

In no particular order, my preference for postgres is driven by:

  * Date / time functions that don't suck
  * UTF-8 is really UTF-8
  * 99% of a backup can be done live with nothing more than rsyncing the data directory and the WAL files
  * Really comprehensive documentation
  * LTREE and fuzzy string match extensions
  * Familiarity from using it for years
MySQL/Maria I'm sure is fine, but it's one of hose things where it's just different enough and I haven't encountered a compelling use case for changing my preference.
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fhdsgbbcaA ◴[] No.41875336[source]
UTF-8 is what made me switch. It’s insane MySQL has something called UTF-8 that isn't really UTF-8, but do have a type UTF8MB4 that actually is correct. This means if you use UFT-8 in MySQL, you can’t use emoji for example.
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bastawhiz ◴[] No.41875430[source]
And the fact that adding real utf-8 support limited (limits?) the length of strings that can be indexed
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evanelias ◴[] No.41875764[source]
Postgres limits btree keys to 2704 bytes, which is actually slightly smaller than MySQL's limit of 3072 bytes, assuming the default InnoDB storage engine.

That said, when using utf8mb4 in an index key, MySQL uses the "worst case" of each character being 4 bytes. So it effectively limits the max key size to 3072/4 = 768 characters, when a column is using the utf8mb4 character set.

For practical purposes, this doesn't cause much pain, as it's generally inadvisable to use complete long-ish strings as a key. And there are various workarounds, like using prefixes or hashes as the key, or using binary strings as keys to get the full 3072 bytes (if you don't need collation behaviors).

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bastawhiz ◴[] No.41875901[source]
> So it effectively limits the max key size to 3072/4 = 768 characters, when a column is using the utf8mb4 character set.

This is exactly what I mean. 768 characters for an index is woefully bad. And for no obviously great reason: you can just index the encoded UTF-8 text.

This was literally reason why a former company (who will remain nameless) refused to add Unicode support. It's not even an imagined problem.

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1. sgarland ◴[] No.41876347[source]
You should not be indexing 768 characters in any circumstance I can imagine. Go ahead and try it. Spin up two tables, fill them with a few million rows, and slap and index on them. Give one a reasonable prefix limit, and let the other go wild. Make sure you ANALYZE each, then run queries in a loop and check the times.

Spoiler: I literally did this a couple of days ago. The index size bloat means that any possible savings you might have gained from collisions are obliterated from page fetches. I tested with a measly 128 characters vs. a prefix of 16, and that was enough for the average query time to be equal, with the smaller index winning for the minimum.