MVCC – the part of PostgreSQL we hate the most (2023)

With every new PostgreSQL release we see yet more features and sugar added to the frontend, yet seemingly no meaningful improvement to the backend/storage layer which suffers these fundamental problems.

I wish the PostgreSQL community would stop chasing more frontend features and spend a concerted few years completely renovating their storage layer. The effort in each release seems massively and disproportionately skewed towards frontend improvements without the will to address these fundamental issues.

It's absurd that in 2024, "the world's most advanced open source database" doesn't have a method of doing upgrades between major versions that doesn't involve taking the database down.

Yes, logical replication exists, but it still doesn't do DDL, so it has big caveats attached.

Better yet: decouple front and back ends. Let them talk over a stable interface and evolve independently. The SQLite ecosystem is evolving in this direction, in fits and starts.