Postgres's whole origin story is basically to think outside the box and don't be constrained by existing thinking. Stonebraker thought existing databases were too limited in terms of their data types and expressiveness. He started Postgres as an evolution of Ingres (Postgres = Post Ingres) that added rich custom data types and a rewriting system based on rules.

Columnar and all the other fun stuff (JSON, GIS, inverted indexes, embedding vectors) is a natural progression of that thinking. With TimescaleDB, Hydra, Citus, pg_mooncake, etc. becoming very popular the last few years, there is a clear demand for an integrated experience.

(Stonebraker also thought one database shouldn't do everything, as described in his early 2000s "One Size Does Not Fit All" paper, and Stonebraker branched out into HStore/Vertica for columnar. In hindsight, I think that was appropriate for the time, but no longer a significant concern.)

PostgreSQL was a right tool for my task for many years. It is a question for PostgreSQL can adapt to a new reality of much bigger datasets or I have to switch to a new tool. And I am not the only user of Postgresql in this context. So it is easy to say in vacuum 'you are using the wrong database', but it's not something that can be easily changed with 100s of Tb of data, existing user workflows etc.

I mean I don't disagree with you, but they did just add a graph database feature, which is about as orthogonal to relational database design as you can get.

Supabase customers run it (marked alpha).

https://supabase.com/blog/orioledb-launch

And they continue to work on it.

https://supabase.com/blog/orioledb-patent-free

Indexed views are much faster than trying to achieve the same result with triggers. Triggers have serious concurrency limitations, and you do recalculations even when the fields you depend on are not touched.

Indexed views are not much worse than indexes. Of course, when they refer to other tables there are underlying data lookups, but in our experience when we moved from triggers to indexed views, large scale data ingestion went way faster.

Where we used it: While revamping a large scale sales program, we stored the warehouse in/out in one table, and several things like current stock were calculated using indexed views.

Bonus: Using Snapshot concurrency control, you can do many things concurrently, and only when they both updates to a certain product in the same store you'll get the second transaction failing (which could be retried on the backend).

The fact that they are completely in-sync with your data is amazing.

These things exist to eliminate the risk of ever serving stale information from a materialised view. I.e., their benefit is political/reputational as much as they are technical in the sense that they save you effort like remembering to invalidate a MV after an ingest operation.

Stale MV is a thing you only ever burn your fingers on once. Like how "It's not DNS" is a common meme in networking.

Don't know of anything wrong with MariaDB, but there used to be plenty wrong with MySQL. To give the most egregious example (THANKFULLY fixed in MariaDB, but was present in MySQL for the longest time), inserting the value 128 into a TINYINT column (signed 8-bit int) would clamp the value rather than returning an error. Which might be what you want... except if that was a primary key column. Marvel at the following, which used to be how MySQL behaved:

Note: the below taken nearly verbatim from https://sql-info.de/mysql/referential-integrity.html#3_5

  CREATE DATABASE foo;
  USE foo;
  CREATE TABLE one ( id TINYINT NOT NULL PRIMARY KEY ) TYPE=InnoDB ;
  CREATE TABLE two (
    id TINYINT NOT NULL PRIMARY KEY,
    INDEX (id),
    CONSTRAINT id_fkey FOREIGN KEY (id) REFERENCES one(id)
  ) TYPE=InnoDB ;

Now that we've created both tables, let's insert a record into table one:

  INSERT INTO one VALUES (127);

And now let's insert a record with a different primary key into table two:

  INSERT INTO two VALUES (128);

MariaDB will give you an error at this point (ERROR 1264 (22003): Out of range value for column 'id' at row 1), but MySQL (at least back when I tried this about ten years ago, which was the last time I was forced to work with MySQL — and I am so glad I never have to go back!) would return no error message and just say "Query OK, 1 row affected (0.009 sec)".

Now let's select the value we inserted into table "two":

  SELECT * FROM two;

And what do we see? The value 127, even though we inserted 128. Which has created a foreign-key relationship to table "one" that we never intended to put in there.

There are other reasons why MySQL was inadequate, but I no longer remember them. Probably MariaDB has fixed them by now. But I no longer have to use MySQL/MariaDB for anything, and I never want to go back. I have a VERY strong averse reaction, caused by past pain, when I think of using MariaDB. (I actually spun up a virtual machine to test what I wrote here, because there's no way I was going to install MariaDB on my primary work machine).

Just a set of things too minor to move off of it but annoying enough to not want to start with it.

My list:

No `explain (analyze,buffers)`. Instant DDL has some warts (e.g. fk, metadata locks). Query planning bugs (actually... query planning in general is disappointing). Exiting the repl doesn't stop queries. Implicit type casting. Replication lag from large DDL (e.g. creating an index). Lack of two phase DDL (creating constraints NOT VALID and then VALIDATE later). Lack of extensions (e.g. pg_vector). No safe access to inspect buffer cache. AWS Aurora seems to only add shiny new things to Postgres. And more.

Again, none of this is quite enough to migrate off of it for an established system, but certainly enough to avoid it on a new project.

Last I looked, MariaDB still implemented JSON columns as LONGTEXT under the covers, making it a non-starter for any serious use of said type.

Agree about Windows Server. You can run SqlServer on Linux though. I'm not aware of your specific addons, but the Sql Server itself works perfectly well on Linux.

What are some of the add-ons that you run on the server? We run ours in a pretty bare-bones manner so I'm interested to hear what you're doing.

Likely their own fork, not plain PG.

It is, but it's not usable right now without some patches to postgres. At least that was the case as of PG17, and very likely 18 too.

Context: https://www.orioledb.com/docs#:~:text=OrioleDB%20currently%2...

It's not about style or formatting, people are tired of reading slop.

It has extremely low false positive rate in various tests (e. g. https://arxiv.org/html/2501.15654v1), I've never seen it mark something I knew was human written as AI.

This IS a criticism of the end product.

Interesting, I was wondering why Snowflake was investing in PostgreSQL. Looks like Snowflake bought Crunchy Data and Databricks bought NEON… so the two leading DWaaS companies have managed PostgreSQL offerings now.