Comment by mau | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mau | Hacker News Reader

Many people here are comparing this feature of Postgres with MongoDB or other document-oriented NoSQL dbs. I think the comparison is just wrong and unfair.

Even if I'm amazed by the performance of Postgres for this particular task (considering also that is a relatively new feature), I don't think performance is the reason why people are using NoSQL dbs. The problem that NoSQL dbs are helping with is scaling. I don't see this as a priority for an RDBMS such as Postgres. Take for instance MongoDB (just because it was named by many of the other comments here, but I guess the same apply to Couch or others): it's relatively simple to deploy a cluster with automatic sharding, replica, failover, etc.. because these are all builtin features.

"NoSQL" encompases too wide a sphere to say something like the problem that NoSQL dbs are helping with is scaling.

Some NoSQL solutions are focused on extreme scale (Cassandara, HBase etc).

Some NoSQL solutions are focused on extreme performance (Redis).

Some NoSQL solutions are focused on developer ergonomics (MongoDB).

Postgres is an interesting option. It ticks the "good enough" box for just about everything, but doesn't ever seem to be leading the pack in any of the "NoSQL" categories. That's probably fine, since it does lead the "Open Source SQL Database" field, and that's a pretty important field to lead.

SQL DBs scale just as well as NoSQL and in the exact same ways: read only clones, sharding, federation, etc. YouTube runs on MySQL in case you're worried about scaling. It may be a tad easier with something like Mongo but it's not hard with MySQL.

IMO, NoSQL is attractive mostly because it's schemaless. You need to change up your model all the time, or handle arbitrary datasets but still query them? NoSQL may be the right tool for the job.

> handle arbitrary datasets

I was wondering: does the postgres json type does not fulfill all of MongoDB's current feature set?

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