Greenplum VS citus

Friends don't let their friends choose Mysql :)

A super long time ago (decades) when I was using Oracle regularly I had to make a decision on which way to go. Although Mysql then had the mindshare I thought that Postgres was more similar to Oracle, more standards compliant, and more of a real enterprise type of DB. The rumor was also that Postgres was heavier than MySQL. Too many horror stories of lost data (MyIsam), bad transactions (MyIsam lacks transaction integrity), and the number of Mysql gotchas being a really long list influenced me.

In time I actually found out that I had underestimated one of the most important attributes of Postgres that was a huge strength over Mysql: the power of community. Because Postgres has a really superb community that can be found on Libera Chat and elsewhere, and they are very willing to help out, I think Postgres has a huge advantage over Mysql. RhodiumToad [Andrew Gierth] https://github.com/RhodiumToad & davidfetter [David Fetter] https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidfetter are incredibly helpful folks.

I don't know that Postgres' licensing made a huge difference or not but my perception is that there are a ton of 3rd party products based on Postgres but customized to specific DB needs because of the more liberalness of the PG license which is MIT/BSD derived https://www.postgresql.org/about/licence/

Some of the PG based 3rd party DBs:

Enterprise DB https://www.enterprisedb.com/ - general purpose PG with some variants

Greenplum https://greenplum.org/ - Data warehousing

Crunchydata https://www.crunchydata.com/products/hardened-postgres - high security Postgres for regulated environments

Citus https://www.citusdata.com - Distributed DB & Columnar

Timescale https://www.timescale.com/

Why Choose PG today?

If you want better ACID: Postgres

If you want more compliant SQL: Postgres

If you want more customizability to a variety of use-cases: Postgres using a variant

If you want the flexibility of using NOSQL at times: Postgres

If you want more product knowledge reusability for other backend products: Postgres

I was wondering if anyone had thought about using this to experiment with the planner.

The engineering and support teams at Greenplum, a fork of Postgres, have a tool (minirepro[0]) which, given a sql query, can grab a minimal set of DDLs and the associated statistics for the tables involved in the query that can then be loaded into a "local" GPDB instance. Having the DDL and the statistics meant the team was able to debug issues in the optimizer (example [1]), without having access to a full set of data. This approach, if my understanding is correct, could be enabled in the browser with this Postgres WASM capability.

[0] https://github.com/greenplum-db/gpdb/blob/6X_STABLE/gpMgmt/b...

A database solution architect at AWS, with over 10 years of experience in the database industry. Lili has been involved in the R&D of the Hadoop/Hive NoSQL database, enterprise-level database DB2, distributed data warehouse Greenplum/Apache HAWQ and Amazon’s cloud native database.

Today, it is normal for enterprises to leverage diversified databases. In my market of expertise, China, in the Internet industry, MySQL together with data sharding middleware is the go to architecture, with GreenPlum, HBase, Elasticsearch, Clickhouse and other big data ecosystems being auxiliary computing engine for analytical data. At the same time, some legacy systems (such as SQLServer legacy from .NET transformation, or Oracle legacy from outsourcing) can still be found in use. In the financial industry, Oracle or DB2 is still heavily used as the core transaction system. New business is migrating to MySQL or PostgreSQL. In addition to transactional databases, analytical databases are increasingly diversified as well.

Green Plum

PostgreSQL is a free and advanced database system with the capacity to handle a lot of data. It’s available for very large data in several forms like Greenplum and Redshift on Amazon. It is open source and is managed by an organized and very principled community.

2003 - https://greenplum.org/

There's Greenplum!

I see they don't mention Citus (https://github.com/citusdata/citus), which is already a fairly mature native Postgres extension. From the details given in the article, in sounds like they just reimplemented it.

I wonder if they were unaware of it or disregarded it for a reason —I currently am in a similar situation as the one described in the blog, trying to shard a massive Postgres DB.

It is possible, if you pay for it. You can do Multi-AZ Clustered Instances in RDS, where you get the benefits of Multi-AZ failover with traffic sharing.

If you can run your own infra – at least on an EC2 level – you can do things like Citus [0] for Postgres, which is about as close to "just add database nodes" as you'll get.

[0]: https://www.citusdata.com/

So while searching for something like this for postgres I came across citus. Any one know how that stacks up?

https://github.com/citusdata/citus

References: CitusDB