Why choose Postgres
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Summary
Transcript
Transcript

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The first thing we gotta figure out is why, why choose Postgres? There are a lot of good reasons, and we'll cover some social ones and some technical ones, but you gotta figure out why are we even talking about Postgres. The first reason you might choose Postgres is
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because everybody's talking about Postgres. It's popular right now. It's popular for a reason, but you might be coming to it because a lot of people are flocking to the Postgres ecosystem. I'm okay with that. I don't love chasing fads, but
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in this case, I'll allow it 'cause Postgres is very good. Another reason might be that your community favors Postgres. Ruby on Rails historically has always favored Postgres. The JavaScript, uh, frameworks typically favor Postgres. PHP
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historically has been a MySQL community with the LAMP stack. That is starting to change. Postgres is starting to win over the PHP community as well. I'm okay with this reason. The reason I like going with what your community chooses is you are right down
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the middle. You're gonna find lots of people you can talk to for help, consultants, people you can hire, companies writing blog posts. That's all really great. So if you stay right down the middle of what's popular in your community, there's a chance your life will be easier when it comes to
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looking for resources to help you. Another reason might be that there are a lot of Postgres hosts right now. So if you don't want to manage your own database, you can outsource it to some very capable third party, and there are a lot of those
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out there. There are not very many MySQL hosts. And so you may be looking around and saying, "Listen, I'm trying to build a company. I don't want to run a database. I need to find a reliable host." There are a lot of Postgres ones out there. That's okay with
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me. So those are, those are kind of social reasons, right? Beyond that, there are technical reasons, and I wanna cover just a few of them before we get into how to actually use the thing, and the first is reliability. Postgres has been around since 1986. So the
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first one, (tapping) the, the first real reason that you might choose Postgres is reliability. It's been around since the '80s, and all of those weird edge cases have mostly been figured out by now. When you write data, you can be pretty confident
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that it's going to be written and not corrupted, it's going to be persisted. You can count on it. This is also true... Frankly, this is also true of MySQL and SQLite. They're both super reliable. These databases have been around for a long time, but the
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next one is not true of, uh, MySQL, and that is extensibility. Extensibility is mostly only true of Postgres. So we're gonna put, we're gonna put extensibility as another reason why you might choose
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Postgres over some of the other ones. MySQL is not very extensible. Postgres, frankly, is kind of more of a platform (laughs) than it is just a database. SQLite, you can have lots of extensions, but Postgres, there are thousands of
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extensions. If you want full-text search, you've got it. If you want vector embeddings, you've got it. You've got Timescale for time series. You've got PostGIS for geographical stuff. Basically, anything you want, you can find an extension for. I would be careful. I
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wouldn't load down your database with too many extensions. I definitely wouldn't use ones that aren't vetted, but if you want it, you can probably find it when it comes to Postgres extensions. Another place that Postgres really shines is in its data
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types. So the types that are available in Postgres, this is where it beats out SQLite and MySQL. There are like 40 data types. We're not gonna cover all of those in this series. In, in the Mastering Postgres series, I
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cover a lot more of those, but there are like 40 data types in Postgres. I think SQLite has five. MySQL has more, but, um, they sit, it sits somewhere between SQLite and Postgres. But i- it's not just that they have
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more, it's that the, the database is tuned for these specific data types. You can more accurately represent your data, you can more accurately represent reality in Postgres. So there's a native UUID data type. There are
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ranges. There are, uh, there's really good support for JSON. There's really good support for geo stuff. So Postgres beats out both MySQL and SQLite when it comes to data types. And then finally, the last one that I think, uh,
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is a good reason to choose Postgres is the community. So Postgres is a very vibrant, open source community. Uh, MySQL's owned by Oracle, and there's not a lot of community built around it. SQLite
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has a pretty good community, but the Postgres is a truly... The Postgres community is truly open, welcoming, um, and very, very vibrant. And so you can find a lot of help for Postgres from the community. So these are some reasons why you
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might choose Postgres over something like MySQL or SQLite. And having such a vibrant community means there's a lot of resources. There's a lot of documentation, there's a lot of blog posts, there's a lot of videos, there's a lot of stuff that you can learn, this series (laughs) included, about Postgres.
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So you're gonna learn a database, right? You're gonna learn one either way. I think Postgres is a great one to learn. We're gonna go through some of the Postgres-specific stuff, but we're also gonna go through some general database stuff in this series. This is meant to be your intro to Postgres,
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which is why I named it Intro to Postgres. So, um, if you're ever asked, "Why'd you choose Postgres?" You can say, "It's a fad, and I love it," or you can pull one of these out and really impress some people.