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Comment by jpgvm | Hacker News Reader

Golden Rule of data: Use PostgreSQL unless you have an extremely good reason not to.

PostgreSQL is extremely good at append-mostly data, i.e like a chat log and has powerful partitioning features that allow you to keep said chat logs for quite some time (with some caveats) while keeping queries fast.

Generally speaking though PostgreSQL has powerful features for pretty much every workload, hence the Golden Rule.

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100% this, and even though I work for Google I absolutely agree. BUT, for the folks that need it, PostgreSQL just DOESN'T cut it, so it's why we have databases like DynamoDB, Spanner, etc. Arguing that we should "Just use PG" is kinda a moot point.

I think I said this in another comment, but I'm not shitting on Spanner or DDB's right to exist here. Obviously, there are _some_ problems for which a globally distributed ACID compliant SQL-compatible database are useful. However, those problems are few and far between, and many/most of them exist at companies like Google. The fact is your average small to medium size enterprise doesn't need and doesn't benefit from DDB/Spanner, but "enterprise architects" love to push them for some ungodly reason.

Don't forget PostgreSQL extensions. For something like a chat log, TimescaleDB (https://www.timescale.com/) can be surprisingly efficient. It will handle partitioning for you, with additional features like data reordering, compression, and retention policies.

this is what I've done sqlite3 for my personal stuff, postgres for everything else. I'm far from a "120 million requests per second" level though, so my experience is limited to small to mid-size ops for businesses.

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