←back to thread

570 points davidgu | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
Show context
osigurdson ◴[] No.44527817[source]
I like this article. Lots of comments are stating that they are "using it wrong" and I'm sure they are. However, it does help to contrast the much more common, "use Postgres for everything" type sentiment. It is pretty hard to use Postgres wrong for relational things in the sense that everyone knows about indexes and so on. But using something like L/N comes with a separate learning curve anyway - evidenced in this case by someone having to read comments in the Postgres source code itself. Then if it turns out that it cannot work for your situation it may be very hard to back away from as you may have tightly integrated it with your normal Postgres stuff.

I've landed on Postgres/ClickHouse/NATS since together they handle nearly any conceivable workload managing relational, columnar, messaging/streaming very well. It is also not painful at all to use as it is lightweight and fast/easy to spin up in a simple docker compose. Postgres is of course the core and you don't always need all three but compliment each other very well imo. This has been my "go to" for a while.

replies(12): >>44528211 #>>44528216 #>>44529511 #>>44529632 #>>44529640 #>>44529854 #>>44530773 #>>44531235 #>>44531722 #>>44532418 #>>44532993 #>>44534858 #
fathomdeez ◴[] No.44528216[source]
This kind of issue always comes up when people put business logic inside the database. Databases are for data. The data goes in and the data goes out, but the data does not get to decide what happens next based on itself. That's what application code is for.
replies(12): >>44528249 #>>44528293 #>>44528307 #>>44528582 #>>44528918 #>>44529077 #>>44529583 #>>44530054 #>>44530782 #>>44530978 #>>44532428 #>>44533144 #
bevr1337 ◴[] No.44528249[source]
> the data does not get to decide what happens next based on itself.

Then why bother with a relational database? Relations and schemas are business logic, and I'll take all the data integrity I can get.

replies(2): >>44528275 #>>44529035 #
1. jl6 ◴[] No.44529035[source]
I think an argument can be made that relations, schemas and constraints encode a kind of business logic that is intrinsic to the definition and integrity of the data, while other types of business logic represent processes that may hinge on data but aren’t as tightly coupled to it. Similar to the difference between a primitive type and a function.

I guess some will argue that their business logic is special and really is so tightly coupled to the data definition that it belongs in the database, and I’m not going to claim those use cases don’t exist, but I’ve seen over-coupling far more often than under-coupling.

This is why I say: Applications come and go, but data is forever.