Like native JSON support?

tomnipotent · on Oct 18, 2018

I would rather have query parallelism, advanced partitioning, and online index creation than JSON support.

Postgres is an amazing RDBMS and the clearly the most advanced open source offering (I use it for my startup), but it will always trail the big commercial systems like SQL Server and Oracle. The query planners for both of those RDBMS' are still considerably more advanced.

monus21 · on Oct 18, 2018

I used to work in enterprise. There's nothing I miss more than Oracle's automatic partition management.

zeroname · on Oct 18, 2018

That's a "hipster" feature, not something that the "enterprise" customers of these products are asking for.

Twisell · on Oct 18, 2018

This is quite a pedantic opinion. I’ve found jsonb pretty useful to handle semi-structured data in production.

I wouldn’t try to use jsonb attribute in a primary key though (even if it’s practically possible as it’s a fully featured base type).

gleenn · on Oct 18, 2018

Not sure if you're trying to be funny about the hipster thing.

I've seen the json features used at multiple serious organizations. It turned what would have otherwise been unnecessarily complicated queries into really reasonable queries in our ETL pipeline.

derefr · on Oct 18, 2018

It's a difference of mindset.

Postgres includes many features that increase the number of simple use-cases for the existing data in their database, thus allowing you to replace a Postgres complement (like Mongo) with Postgres for that use-case.

"Enterprise" DBMSes like Oracle and MSSQL, meanwhile, don't focus so much on expanding the use-cases of their offering, as they do on expanding the number of ways a sysadmin can take the existing use-cases and make them scale better, with less manual maintenance. Oracle and Microsoft allow you to replace their ecosystem of tools and extensions with a DBMS-internal feature for the given sysadmin need.

So Postgres has an expanding ecosystem of tooling and extensions, but is slowly eating its complements; while Oracle and MSSQL have an expanding space of complementary offerings, but are slowly eating their own product ecosystems.

Or, to put that another way: Postgres focuses more on making life easier for people who write SQL; Oracle and Microsoft focus more on making life easier for the DBAs who manage the DBMS cluster that people are running SQL against.