Has it really come to this?
AI is everywhere these days
Postgres and AI go together like elephants and chocolate. At first glance, it seems like a silly combination. Postgres is an RDBMS for storing data with ACID compliance, functions, views, and maybe some extensions or foreign data wrappers. Where is room for AI in that? It may be trendy to take something, rub some AI on it, and then declare it a breakthrough technology, but that isn’t necessarily reality.
Last Phriday we explored just where Postgres could end up in the future. One possible question which may have occurred to a reader was probably something along the lines of “That doesn’t even really sound like Postgres anymore. Why not just write another database?”
Let’s just be outright about it: Postgres is the best RDBMS engine currently available. It’s certainly bold to claim that any database engine is “the best”, and as the saying goes, “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
What is High Availability to Postgres? I’ve staked my career on the answer to that question since I first presented an HA stack to Postgres Open in 2012, and I still don’t feel like there’s an acceptable answer. No matter how the HA techniques have advanced since then, there’s always been a nagging suspicion in my mind that something is missing.
But I’m here to say that a bit of research has uncovered an approach that many different Postgres cloud vendors appear to be converging upon.
When it comes to reordering the items in a list, databases have long had a kind of Faustian Bargain to accomplish the task. Nobody really liked any of the more common solutions, least of all the poor database tasked with serving up the inevitable resulting hack.
Postgres is no different in this regard. Consider a list_item table like this, demonstrating five items in a to-do list:
Postgres is one of those database engines that carves out a niche and garners adherents with various levels of religious zeal. The community, while relatively small when compared to that of something like MongoDB, is helpful almost to a fault. Members from the freshest minted newb to the most battle tested veteran will often trip over themselves to answer questions found in the various dedicated forums, mailing lists, and chat rooms.
