Do you really need separate systems when you already have Postgres?
3 hours ago
- #Database Optimization
- #Postgres
- #Microservices
- Postgres can often replace separate systems like Redis, Elasticsearch, MongoDB, and others for caching, search, queues, and more, reducing operational overhead.
- Running multiple databases and microservices leads to increased maintenance, monitoring complexity, costs, and debugging challenges, often prematurely.
- Most projects don't reach 'webscale' and can rely on 'boring' tech like Postgres, as used by large companies such as Notion and Netflix.
- Postgres offers built-in or extension-based solutions for caching (UNLOGGED tables), job queues (SKIP LOCKED), full-text search (tsvector), document storage (JSONB), vector search (pgvector), and other needs.
- Specialized infrastructure should only be added after proving Postgres insufficient and accepting the operational costs, to avoid unnecessary complexity.