Anyway this feature discussed (searching based on a distance) is part of PostGIS extension they are demonstrating here SP-GiST index.
We are using RDS and would like to have a standard PostgreSQL instead. Is there some community supported AMIs that could help us to get started quickly?
Having not used Postgres RDS, what about it makes you want to have a standard Postgres instead?
- not so bad pricing
- good defaults
- no need to worry regarding the backups and easy disaster recovery
- some monitoring out of the box
- support TLS with a valid cert out of the box
- easy replication
Here are some pain-points we have, I'm probably forgetting some but those were really painful:
- You don't have a superadmin access, we had several issues where some tables, sequences or objects where associated with a user we wanted to delete and this was really hard, I think we were supposed to change the owner of each objects one by one. [0] shows the issue. In the end, we solved it by dumping the database, deleting the user, recreating the database. Thankfully, this wasn't in prod.
- Many extensions cannot be installed, for example Timescale. It's a bit sad having PostgreSQL and not being able to take full advantage of it.
What I regret about those is that there is nothing you can do, for the first point I looked everywhere and many have this issue but there is nothing you can do to solve it easily, there is posts both on StackOverflow and PostgreSQL mailing list but no easy solution, you have to track one by one the object whose owner you want to delete and reassign them. For the second, it means you can't use many useful extensions like Timescale or anything not yet released.
If there was some AMI with PostgreSQL already installed and correctly configured on which we could just connect an EBS, we could migrate very easily.
[0] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/44718654/cant-delete-pos...
One of nice things about RDS is seamless replication and backups, this is not available out of the box, and you kind of need to set it up yourself, it is not that hard, especially if you have a CMS (such as salt, chef) helps a lot with it.
There is already RDS functionality available through open source, if you're on premises I would highly recommend repmgr[2] and barman[3] the former is making setting replication and failover easy, the later is performing streaming backups and PITR.
In AWS in place of barman, you could perhaps use WAL-E[4] or WAL-G[5] these basically do the same thing barman does, but instead of running an instance that keeps the backup WAL-E and WAL-G stores backups directly in S3.
There's also Patroni[6] which is an alternative to repmgr. I have used personally repmgr and barman, and there wasn't really much overhead maintaining it. Although in public cloud the other solutions might be more suited?
The nice thing for maintaining your own setup is greater control over the database, for example you have full control over what extensions you use or which version of PG you deploy. Many changes that in RDS require server restart, you can just restart the process and have lower downtime. In my company we also went with Aurora PG 9.6 there's already Aurora PG 10, but there's currently no upgrade path without taking everything down, backing up and restoring on another instance. Supposedly AWS is working on it, but they won't tell when it is available. Also there's no PG 11 or heh, 12. With own PG setup also major version upgrade is quite quick, I think it took 2 minutes, if you were sure you have backups and performed upgrade in place.
Honestly what RDS offers isn't something that isn't available outside, it's just that might require some prior investment, in our case was writing salt roles that set up and configured the nodes.
[1] https://www.postgresql.org/download/
[3] https://www.pgbarman.org/index.html
[4] https://github.com/wal-e/wal-e
Docker images are their own special version of hell, and I've yet to see one with all of the appropriate bits in place to do a migration without a dump+reload.
Personally, If you're doing the AWS thing and you have a PG design that will do RDS, I'd use that and don't look back. If you've got untrusted languages or other tweaks, you're kind of stuck on your own.