What's that? Did you say you needed an RDBMS that can also handle JSON data? Well have I got good news for you!
this post was submitted on 18 Jul 2025
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Mysql / Mari can handle it too! Just use BLOB π€£
pg can actually query into json fields!
And you can add indexes on those JSON fields too!
Kind of. I hope you don't like performance...
Sure, if you use a field often it is most likely better to extract it into a column with auto-updates from the JSON data.
But you have to tune it and see what is best for your use case. Just saying that you can add indexes to JSON fields as well!
The performance is actually not bad. You're far better off using conventional columns but in the one off cases where you have to store queryable JSON data, it actually performs quite well.
Quite well is very subjective. It's much slower than columns or specialized databases like MongoDB.
Mysql can too, slow af tho.
oh i didn't know that. iirc postgres easily beats mongo in json performance which is a bit embarrassing.
Holy, never knew, and never would expect. Postgres truly is king.
This is literally me at every possible discussion regarding any other RDBMS.
My coworkers joked that I got paid for promoting Postgres.
Then we switched from Percona to Patroni and everyone agreed that... fuck yes, PostgreSQL is the best.
After having suffered with T SQL at MSFT for a number of years... yep, PostGres is almost always the best for almost any enterprise setup, despite what most other corpos seem to think.
Usually their reasons for not using it boil down to:
We would rather pay exorbitant licescing fees of some kind, forever, than rework a few APIs.
Those few APIs already having a fully compatible rewrite, done by me, working in test, prior to that meeting.
Gotta love corpo logic.
Yes, had those issues as well, though lately not a big corp, but mid-sized company.
One manager just wanted MySQL. We had trouble getting required performance from MySQL, when Postgres had good numbers. I had the app fully ready, just to be told no, you make it work in MySQL. So we dropped some 'useless stuff' like deferring flushing to disk and such.
I used to agree, but recently tried out Clickhouse for high ingestion rate time series data in the financial sector and Iβm super impressed by it. Postgres was struggling and we migrated.
This isnβt to say that itβs better overall by any means, but simply that I did actually find a better tool at a certain limit.
I've been using ClickHouse too and it's significantly faster than Postgres for certain analytical workloads. I benchmarked it and while Postgres took 47 seconds, ClickHouse finished within 700ms when performing a query on the OpenFoodFacts dataset (~9GB). Interestingly enough TimescaleDB (Postgres extension) took 6 seconds.
| Insertion | Query speed | |
|---|---|---|
| Clickhouse | 23.65 MB/s | β650ms |
| TimescaleDB | 12.79 MB/s | β6s |
| Postgres | - | β47s |
| SQLite | 45.77 MB/s^1^ | β22s |
| DuckDB | 8.27 MB/s^1^ | crashed |
^All^ ^actions^ ^were^ ^performed^ ^through^ ^Datagrip^
^1^ ^Insertion^ ^speed^ ^is^ ^influenced^ ^by^ ^reduced^ ^networking^ ^overhead^ ^due^ ^to^ ^the^ ^databases^ ^being^ ^in-process.^
Updates and deletes don't work as well and not being able to perform an upsert can be quite annoying. However, I found the ReplacingMergeTree and AggregatingMergeTree table engines to be good replacements so far.
Also there's !clickhouse@programming.dev
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I have a colleague like that too, and then the other camp that loves MySQL.
Why do you like postgres
I made several lengthy presentations about many features, mainly those that are/were missing in MySQL.
In short, MySQL (has been) shit since its inception, with insane defaults and lacking SQL support.
After Oracle bought it, it got better, but it's catching up with stuff that Postgres has had for 20+ years (in some cases).
Also, fuck Oracle, it's a shit company.
Edit: if I had to pick the best features I can't live without, it would be 'returning', copy mode and arrays
Oracle:
Only the best in B2B marketing for our shit software.
EDIT:
hah ok, round two, more directly playing on the actual company name:
Oracle:
We tell you what you think you want to hear.
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As a complete newb to Postgres, I LOVE arrays.
Postgres feels like all of the benefits of a database and a document store.
Yeah, that was the goal.
First make it feature-complete document-oriented database, then make if peroformant.
And you can feel the benefits in every step of the way. Things just work, features actually complement each other... and there's always a way to make any crazy idea stick.
I usually tell people running MySQL that they would probably be better off using a NoSQL key-value store, SQLite, or PostgreSQL, in that order. Most people using MySQL don't actually need an RDBMS. MySQL occupies this weird niche of being optimised for mostly reads, not a lot of concurrency and cosplaying as a proper database while being incompatible with SQL standards.
incompatible with SQL standards.
Wait... Wait a minute, is that Oracle's entrance musicβ½
Sure, once you make the move itβs great. Itβs just that it takes time and resources to actually make the move
I mean, with mysql_fwd, I migrated the data quickly, and apart from manual 'on duplicate update' queries (or rare force index) it works the same.
As a (data) scientist I am not super familiar with most databases, but duckdb is great for what I need it for.
Things happen magically with docker. Container needs PostgreSQL? Expose the port, define a volume, username and password, connect service to that port, forget PostgreSQLβs existence until data corruption.
Not data corruption, but I replaced by mistake my .env file for authentik, containing the password for the postgresql database...
Cue a couple existential crisis for not having set up backups, thinking about nuking the whole installation, learning about postgresql, and finally managing to manually set another password.
Yeah, I feel several years older now...
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first thing i'd ask it is how to pronounce SQL
Sequel with external collaborators.
Squeal with the homies.
Yup, and it's S-Q-L not sequel (π€’)
squeal gang rise up!
?
I've been working on and with sql dbs since... 2011?
Earlier than that if you don't count professional work.
Always pronounced it Sequel, as has everyone I have worked with, at least of those who actually have some kind of software dev related role.
Its got two syllables.
Quicker and easier to say than three syllables.
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15 years ago I called it S-Q-L and then I was told that it's wrong and it's "Sequel", and they kept calling it Sequel in college so for the past 10 years I've called it Sequel, My-Sequel, Sequel-lite, Postgres, transact-sequel, etc. Now y'all are telling me it's not Sequel
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No need. It's the best DB... Until you need something portable
My laptops runs postgres, but it is still pretty portable
What do you mean by "portable"?
Just if you need to be able to take it with you.
The whole point of a database is that you leave it where it is though
I think the OP is trying to talk about SQLite, so yeah, he could really be talking about carrying it on his phone.
But it's just such a weird word to use there that I can't really be sure.
Or portable like on a USB stick that you can put in any computer instead of installed on a single system.
Either way, the funny thing is that Postgres can do both too. You may not want to use it for those, but you absolutely can.
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I'm running it on a raspberry pi, how much more portable could you need?
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