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zachmax

I feel like this feature replaces almost all of Mongo's use cases!

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As soon as Postgres adds the "random data loss" feature they will have a full superset of Mongo.

You can always turn off fsyncs…

Then you might as well use pg.

I think he meant that you can turn off fsyncs in pg in order to add random data loss :-)

You might be interested in this paper where the author touches on fsync.

https://people.freebsd.org/~seanc/postgresql/scale15x-2017-p...

I'm interested. When you say almost, can you elaborate on any remaining use cases when you'd use Mongo?

At my previous company we made heavy use of its lossy compression feature.

What lossy compression? Were you guys throwing bits into /dev/null?

Is that related to the cool "hash compression" technology I hear about? Apparently it can compress an arbitrarily large file into just a few bytes, amazing!

You would get compression with Postgres running on ZFS.

Postgresql has compression by default on, for all large text and other large fields that get great benefit of compression. From documentation -" The technique is affectionately known as TOAST (or "the best thing since sliced bread"). "- https://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.0/static/storage-toast.htm...

Lossy compression, not lossless.

Database plus Copy-On-Write file systems sound like a bad idea. I am imagining a modest 100gb database being re-written for every change.

I am sure there is some way to work around this, but wouldn't this be the default behavior with a typical database and typical COW file system?

You might be interested in reading this paper: https://people.freebsd.org/~seanc/postgresql/scale15x-2017-p...

I am interested and I appreciate the thought and link, however these appear to be the slides to a talk without the actual talk. If so they are of limited use because the slides never have all the information the presenter has, and that information is often just a summary.

Is this the correct talk: https://youtu.be/dwMQXLOXUco?t=5380 ?

Yes, sorry about that, that is the corresponding talk to the slides. Thanks for pointing that out.

First, you have to make sure the page sizes for the FS and DB match. That's a critical requirement. But yes, you'll get write expansion twice.

In random cloud provider you may not get FS with compression on your machine..

I know it's pretty popular to hate on Mongodb now (even more so than it was to love on Mongodb 4 years ago), but there are still areas where it's better than a relational db. In game development, it's extremely helpful (especially as an "indie") to change the structure on a whim so easily. Also based on the design of the game I'm working on, I believe the document structure captures the structure of the data so much better than if I was forced to make a bunch of tables. This aides in understanding the representation of our game's data, and I believe (but haven't tested) it will be faster than a relational db for my use case, but that's an ancillary benefit anyway.

But the posters above you said that JSON and JSONB types in Postgres, and functionality around them, eliminated the need to use other databases for document type data.

What you are describing can be done with PostgreSQL. One thing that is missing is better client libraries that make use of those data types. Morphia wins for now in that regard.

.NET has great support with Marten:

http://jasperfx.github.io/marten/

My claim wasn't that it didn't fulfill their needs, it was that it doesn't fulfill all needs (gamedev is one example that I'm familiar with).

Postgres storing JSON types != All mongo functionality

I'm sure I could achieve everything I'm doing in mongo by some roundabout way in Postgres, but if you're doing a large amount of reading/modifying partial fields within JSON structure, it's the exact use case for mongo.

https://www.github.com/JerrySievert/MongoLike

that said, I actually use partial JSONB updates on a regular basis, but I tend to use PLV8 to do the heavy lifting.

What is the point of posting that ?

(1) It's a proof of concept, (2) it hasn't been updated in 3 years and (3) it still isn't the same syntax as MongoDB.

The point still remains that PostgreSQL isn't just a 1-1 replacement for MongoDB which is pretty common sense to me anyway.

Wow, that's a pretty hostile response.

1) it's a proof of concept that others have improved upon to show that you can indeed replace the functionality of mongo that most developers tend to rely on.

2) neither has mongodb at that level

3) that's correct, you need to actually use the term SELECT when you use the functions

and you are correct, pg is missing the random data loss that comes with mongo. it will never be 1-1 in regards to that.

EDITING TO ADD:

the important part is the note (the bulk of the comment) that I'm updating partial JSONB data on a very regular basis, and do it using PLV8, getting rid of the need for an unreliable database and instead using exactly what this news story is about.

Marten for .net

A small independent game is where I've used it before as well. And currently I'm working on an app/game sort of thing where it makes a lot of sense because we're iterating often and fast. I like that it kinda gets out of my way and just works, though perhaps I would not so much had I experienced the data loss others speak of.

Yeah I've read some horror stories about that too. I think that the improvements to concurrency (ala WiredTiger), will help wth that, as well as making sure to think about possible concurrency issues from the outset, as I've tried to do.

Have you heard of ToroDB? FWIW they have benchmarks that claim it's running faster on top of Postgres than MongoDB does natively.

"ToroDB Server

It is a MongoDB-compatible server that supports speaks the MongoDB Wire Protocol (and therefore can be used with the same drivers used to connect to any standard MongoDB server) but stores your data into a reliable and trusted ACID database."

https://github.com/torodb/server

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