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Comment by hot_gril | Hacker News Reader

I've built my own little pile of evidence against Spanner using it for several years, after previously being on Postgres. It has good potential but isn't there yet. And if you're making a startup, you're probably a long way from the scale where sharded DBs become necessary.

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I hate this tired argument. If I'm building a startup I'm building it with the intention to hit scale. If I can use cockroach or yugabyte and get 90% of the benefits of postgres without significant additional cost I'm going to use it. I've been at multiple startups that have had trouble scaling their database and the cost to switch database technologies when you hit scale is massive. And worst of all, the limitations of the technology always impact product development. I don't care what cool features postgres has if I can't do online schema changes.

So yeah, I'd rather spend a few more hours picking an actual scalable technology now than spend what could be 7 figures (it can be a lot more, I've heard of this migration uber had to do that was costing them half a billion a year) and massively impact product development moving to scalable technology..

Different teams have different abilities. You can't really make general rules around any of this. Should you use spanner as a default selection for your company's database needs? Maybe.

both good points, including the devs having different abilities and using a ready-made scalable solution. We're living in the world of having something working that you can test in a few days shrug

Some general rules make sense for common use cases. Like, I'll say that a relational DBMS is generally what you want rather than a graph one. For a single-node DB, I'll always use Postgres if I have the choice. For a webserver, can't really go wrong with NodeJS, though you might have reasons to use something else (e.g. cost to run).

But sharding is too use-case specific to prescribe something broadly like Spanner.

> If I can use cockroach or yugabyte and get 90% of the benefits of postgres without significant additional cost I'm going to use it

Here's the problem, it's not 90%. Idk about those two, but you sacrifice a lot using Spanner, maybe enough to delay your launch. Any slightly advanced query becomes hard to optimize, for one. Not to dis Spanner, it's just a very different beast.

CEO won't want to hear "launch is delayed, but it'll scale better later," and it's also not really true. In the initial phases, you can't tell what your actual needs will be at scale, so you'll probably have to rework things anyway. Just using Spanner doesn't solve your scaling problems. Maybe you'll need to totally redo your Spanner schema to actually scale, maybe you find you're better off sharding at the application layer than at the DB.

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