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Comment by rdtsc | Hacker News Reader

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rdtsc·

Why would it be, postgres is not a distributed database?

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It is very difficult to do distribution right, and Postgres is extremely conservative when it comes to new features.

Stability, reliability, and performance are #1

Yap agreed. Slapping something on just to claim "distributed", and then have users lose data, would tarnish the brand and would not be a good idea. (Not that it stopped other products from going that route).

Distributed stuff done right is difficult (as seen by Aphyr's Call Me Maybe tests, how few products survived despite high claims in their marketing).

Genuinly curious: which products survived? All of the ones I read about had problems.

Basho's Riak operating in non-last-write-wins mode didn't lose any writes so that is one solid off-the-shelf product that gets distribution right. Zookeeper performed well as well.

Others that failed redeemed themselves and fixed issues after the results came. I think etcd and Consul devs did that.

Riak, Postgresql, and Zookeeper are the only ones that never lost data. Consul, and etcd were mostly correct.

PostgreSQL was only tested as a single node.

So it's meaningless even bringing it up.

It sure isn't. A DB client and server are distributed, even if not "scale out". It's very easy to get fundamentals wrong if you do not design for them.

It makes no sense to compare PostgreSQL (single node) with Riak, Cassandra etc (multiple nodes). And distributed generally means distributing your data amongst multiple nodes. I don't expect to see a Call Me Maybe test for Chrome even though by your definition it is distributed.

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