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Relational and Non-relational Data: PGSQL Phriday #005

Posted by Andreas 'ads' Scherbaum on

Ryan Lambert asks in this month's PGSQL Phriday:

  • What non-relational data do you store in Postgres and how do you use it?
  • Have you attempted non-relational uses of Postgres that did not work well? What was the problem?
  • What are the biggest challenges with your data, whatever its structure?
  • Bonus: How do you define non-relational data?

Looking over the many databases we operate at work, I can say that we are mostly a "relational shop". Almost every database we have uses relational structures, and does not attempt to go in on "full NoSQL", or "store non-relational data". Many of the databases are on the larger size, often in the hundreds of GB or even several TBs. We have good people in our dev teams who understand both PostgreSQL and SQL, and can develop a proper schema for the data, and write performant queries.

There are a few exceptions though, but at least for us it's only a small number. Whenever we retrieve or get data which comes in from web requests, we may store this as JSON, and then we use JSONb. Quite often however it's rather "storage as JSON", not "querying the JSON in the database". It's just more convenient to keep the data in JSON format all the way, instead of transforming it several times.

 

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PGSQL Phriday #004: PostgreSQL and Software Development

Posted by Andreas 'ads' Scherbaum on

Henrietta Dombrovskaya asks about Software Development and PostgreSQL. That's a very broad topic.

Not being a big developer for myself, and only occasionally submitting patches here and there, I nevertheless have a vast amount of data available on the topic: the "PostgreSQL Person of the Week" interviews! There are a few questions in the interviews which relate to this topic:

  • Could you describe your PostgreSQL development toolbox?
  • Which skills are a must have for a PostgreSQL developer/user?
  • Do you use any git best practices, which makes working with PostgreSQL easier?
  • Do you think PostgreSQL has a high entry barrier?
  • What is your advice for people who want to start PostgreSQL developing - as in, contributing to the project. Where and how should they start?

And having 143 published interviews at this point, there is really interesting data about this topic. I picked two points which aim directly at developers:

 

 

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