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Comment by ericpauley | Hacker News Reader

Postgres is great, but I certainly don't think it's great for everything. For instance, while you can in theory implement OLAP aggregation you're going to be hand-rolling a bunch of stuff that something like Clickhouse gives you for free declaratively.

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I don't think the point is that PostgreSQL is great for everything. But you may get by with a single piece of infrastructure instead of 7.

In most of the applications we build or maintain we use PostgreSQL + cloud storage. That's it. And it works very well, also for: storing JSON, full text search, as a queue, as a vector database. Other software may be better at providing those features, but I'm extremely happy we only need to understand & manage PostgreSQL.

The article says verbatim “PostgreSQL Replaces Clickhouse”.

Coming from storing billions of rows in Clickhouse and performing dozens of materialized operations I shudder to think about what that would look like in a DB that doesn’t even support declarative IVM.

The article suggested using TimescaleDB which has its own concept of IVM: continuos aggregates. And compared to the approach by ClickHouse it can also update the materialized views when you update/delete old raw data

https://sqlfordevs.com/books+courses/timescale/05-continuous...

Yes but that is just one use case. Columnar OLAP engines operating on object storage can do all kinds of stuff so much better than Postgres that it may as well be a completely different capability. That said - the point is that you can get a lot further with just Postgres than many people think, and now we also have options like pg_lake. But I wish I'd changed analytics platforms A LOT sooner than I did.

I've been working on that in Postgres for the past...way too long now: https://commitfest.postgresql.org/patch/6305/

Still not totally declarative, but it at least gets IVM into core in a way people can make use of.

With Lakebase Postgres you can do this very easily: https://docs.databricks.com/aws/en/oltp/projects/quickstart-...

It is already a quite smooth experience, but there is work to make it even easier than that.

I work on Lakebase, opinions my own.

As a big fan of Postgres, Databricks and Lakebase: Lakebase is not Postgres, and this is just CDC.

Today CDC, tomorrow an authoritative part of storage.

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