nodejs-bigquery VS PostgreSQL

If you've ever wondered what it's like to manage a BigQuery instance at Reddit scale, know that it's exactly like smaller systems just with much, much bigger numbers in the logs. Database management fundamentals are eerily similar regardless of scale or platform; BigQuery handles just about anything we throw at it, and we do indeed throw it the whole book. Our BigQuery platform is more than 100 petabytes of data that supports data science, machine learning, and analytics workloads that drive experiments, analytics, advertising, revenue, safety, and more. As Reddit grew, so did the workload velocity and complexity within BigQuery and thus the need for more elegant and fine-tuned workload management.

Now I know I've got some data I could use, I now need to find a platform that I can use to analyse the data coming from the Forem API. I did consider some other pieces of software, such as Google BigQuery (with looker studio) and ElasticSearch (with Kibana), I ultimately went with OpenSearch which is essentially a forked version of ElasticSearch maintained by AWS. The main reasons are that I could host it locally for free (unlike BigQuery). I do have some prior experience with both elastic (back when it was called ELK) and OpenSearch, but my work with OpenSearch was far more recent, so I decided to go with that.

First, in one of our recent projects, we helped our client to run the cloud-based infrastructure of their entirely automated, real-time SEO platform. The solution rested in the safe familiarity of Google’s popular cloud-based data centres (i.e. Google Cloud Platform), whilst also making use of BigQuery — a serverless, multi-cloud data warehouse.

Bigquery as our data warehouse

This post in github thinks it may be an error in bigquery's backend.

A data warehouse is a specialized database that's purpose built for gathering and analyzing data. Unlike general-purpose databases like MySQL or PostgreSQL, which are designed to meet the real-time performance and transactional needs of applications, a data warehouse is designed to collect and process the data produced by those applications, collectively and over time, to help you gain insight from it. Examples of data-warehouse products include Snowflake, Google BigQuery, Azure Synapse Analytics, and Amazon Redshift — all of which, incidentally, are easily managed with Pulumi.

Google BigQuery

Data Handling: Utilizes Windmill for data pipelines, with a primary database powered by PostgreSQL. Auxiliary data storage is handled by MongoDB, with Redis for caching to optimize performance

PostgreSQL

The LMS Moodle Operator serves as a meta-operator, orchestrating the deployment and management of Moodle instances in Kubernetes. It handles the entire stack required to run Moodle, including components like Postgres, Keydb, NFS-Ganesha, and Moodle itself. Each of these components has its own Kubernetes Operator, ensuring seamless integration and management.

Another key feature of txtai is being able to quickly move from prototyping to production. This article will demonstrate how txtai can integrate with Postgres, a powerful, production-ready and open source object-relational database system. After txtai persists content to Postgres, we'll show it can be directly queried with SQL from any Postgres client

SQL (Structured Query Language) databases are relational databases. They organize data into tables with rows and columns, and they use SQL for querying and managing data. Examples include MySQL, PostgreSQL, and SQLite.

Node.js, MySQL and PostgreSQL servers installed on your machine

Each app’s front end is built with Qwik and uses Tailwind for styling. The server-side is powered by Qwik City (Qwik’s official meta-framework) and runs on Node.js hosted on a shared Linode VPS. The apps also use PM2 for process management and Caddy as a reverse proxy and SSL provisioner. The data is stored in a PostgreSQL database that also runs on a shared Linode VPS. The apps interact with the database using Drizzle, an Object-Relational Mapper (ORM) for JavaScript. The entire infrastructure for both apps is managed with Terraform using the Terraform Linode provider, which was new to me, but made provisioning and destroying infrastructure really fast and easy (once I learned how it all worked).

I've used MySQL for years. But recently, I found myself working PostgreSQL and simple things like dumping and restoring a database are different enough that I decided to document the process. It's straightforward enough once I knew how.

A running Rails application needs a database to connect to. You may already have your database of choice installed, but if not, I recommend PostgreSQL, or Postgres for short. On a Mac, probably the easiest way to install it is with Posrgres.app. Another option, the one I prefer, is to use Homebrew. With Homebrew installed, this command will install PostgreSQL version 16 along with libpq: