Robert Haas

I 100% agree. This is going to be a bit of a longer comment:

1) You are right that startups want all-in Postgres. To do fast analytics, we need to get columnar storage and vectorized processing. In `pg_analytics`, we implemented a Table Access Method (TAM) to try to accomplish this.

TAMs involve changing the storage format of Postgres. When we did this, we discovered there were A LOT of Postgres internals we needed to interface with. We needed to reimplement write-ahead logs (WALs), buffer caching, MVCC, JOINs, and more. Each of these projects is a significant undertaking. Hacking on Postgres is really hard: https://rhaas.blogspot.com/2024/05/hacking-on-postgresql-is-really-hard.html

As a result, in pg_analytics we cut a lot of corners to ship quickly. The performance was great, but when it came to using it in any real production setting, not having these core features of Postgres meant users couldn't really use pg_analytics, and it would take us months/over a year to build any of this. Even more so, the Table Access Method API in Postgres still has a few limitations. The folks being OrioleDB are probably the most state-of-the-art implementation of a TAM, and they joined Supabase and are pushing for upstream patches to the TAM API to enable their workload.

2) At the same time, while you are right that startups want all-in Postgres, we discovered that larger companies typically have so much analytical data that they're pretty much forced to store it on object storage…

Its also worth reading the original post by Robert Haas (the author of pg_plan_advice) on motivation/design: https://rhaas.blogspot.com/2026/03/pgplanadvice-plan-stability-and-user.html

Also, I'll add my perspective: I think "EXPLAIN (PLAN_ADVICE)" is a key piece to making this a plan stability feature, not (just) a hinting feature. The extensibility/framework pg_plan_advice adds is a foundation, that over time will over time address the age-old "Postgres doesn't have hints" problem, even if the initial release doesn't check all the boxes yet, e.g. no way to use advice for adjusting row/join estimates.

To give an example on extensibility: Some people that I've spoken to are asking "but why is it not a comment-style hint". There are reasons why Postgres didn't go that way for this release (comment parsing in core is non-existent today, and comments don't work correctly e.g. for functions), but its easy to write an extension that sets up an advisor hook to parse comments: https://github.com/pganalyze/pg_advice_comment

> My biggest question, when everyone points out how many features PosgreSQL offers, is "why are you doing that in the database?" Your database is your biggest chokepoint.

You shouldn't be doing any CPU intensive calculations in the database if you can avoid it, definitely. But these postgresql features are often about improved efficiency. Take a look at new things coming in postgresql 10[1]. All the new features in there are either performance neutral or big performance wins.

FWIW, I've spent the last few years fixing performance problems in PostgreSQL databases. The solution is most often to de-normalize/pre-compute something, which means using stored procedures and triggers, which are most definitely doing more than "transactionally store and retrieve data".

[1] https://rhaas.blogspot.com/2017/04/new-features-coming-in-postgresql-10.html?m=1

If you're looking for a good series of blog posts about xid wraparound in Postgres check out these posts by Josh Berkus:

http://www.databasesoup.com/2012/09/freezing-your-tuples-off-part-1.html

http://www.databasesoup.com/2012/10/freezing-your-tuples-off-part-2.html

http://www.databasesoup.com/2012/12/freezing-your-tuples-off-part-3.html

And this more recent one by Robert Haas:

https://rhaas.blogspot.com/2018/01/the-state-of-vacuum.html

As Josh states at the end of the third post the current best practices for dealing with this are really workarounds and as Robert states it requires monitoring and management. Postgres is an amazing piece of software and managing this is doable but IMHO this is one of Postgres' worst warts. It would be awesome if someone could donate some funding to improve this.

Check out the Tech and Company pages as well as the slides from the recent South Bay PostgreSQL Meeetup:
http://goo.gl/Mtg2W6

The founders both have strong academic and commercial experience and the advisor is Prof. Joseph Hellerstein (he has both an excellent academic reputation and good experience in industry/tech transfer).

Note that TPCH is a "decision support benchmark". There are other technologies for helping postgres with these workloads as well: a column-store approach like https://github.com/citusdata/cstore_fdw, or the recent work on parallel sequential scans in Postgres core (http://rhaas.blogspot.com/2015/03/parallel-sequential-scan-for-postgresql.html), etc.

I doubt that's possible, for a number of reasons.

1) Neither company owns any part of the PostgreSQL code / docs. We do have various proprietary tools, of course, but so do other companies.

2) The companies employ quite a few PostgreSQL hackers, but if you look at the development stats (e.g. http://rhaas.blogspot.com/2020/05/who-contributed-to-postgresql.html) you'll see there are many committers and developers in other companies.

That being said, I agree with the concerns expressed by Bruce in his blog post. Or more precisely - I do understand why people in the community have those concerns, but I believe (hope) it's not going to harm the community.