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Postgres LISTEN/NOTIFY does not scale

(www.recall.ai)
570 points davidgu | 1 comments | 07 Jul 25 14:05 UTC | HN request time: 0.206s | source
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dumbfounder ◴[10 Jul 25 21:35 UTC] No.44525875[source]▶
Transactional databases are not really the best tool for writing tons of (presumably) immutable records. Why are you using it for this? Why not Elastic?
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1. immibis ◴[13 Jul 25 14:41 UTC] No.44550782[source]▶
Transactional databases are great, provided your write workload is low enough to fit on one server. If you have to scale up past that, you might have to use a different kind of database. But if transactions work for you, as they do for 99% of small-medium sites, they're amazing.

Multi-master transactional databases are an open area of research, as far as I'm aware, but read-only replication is a solved problem. Therefore your write traffic, including your transaction overhead, has to fit within one server's capacity, while your read traffic can scale horizontally as much as you like.