Where database blog posts get flame-broiled to perfection
Well, well, well. Another brave manifesto from the frontiers of database development. I just poured myself a lukewarm coffee in a branded mug I definitely didn't steal from a former employer and settled in to read this... passionate proclamation of Postgres purity. And I must say, it’s a masterpiece.
It takes real courage to stand up and declare your love for PostgreSQL. It’s so brave, so contrarian. Who else is doing that? Oh, right, the forty other companies you mentioned. But your love is clearly different. It's the kind of deep, abiding love that says, "I adore everything about you, which is why I've decided to replace your entire personality and central nervous system with something I cooked up in my garage over a long weekend."
I have to applaud the commitment to building a database from scratch. That’s a term that always fills me with immense confidence. It's a wonderful euphemism for "we read the first half of the Raft paper, skipped the hard parts of ACID, and decided that error handling is a problem for the 2.0 release." It’s the kind of bold, blue-sky thinking that can only come from a product manager who thinks "five nines" is a winning poker hand.
And the pursuit of PostgreSQL compatibility? Chef's kiss. It’s a beautifully ambitious goal, a North Star to guide the engineering team. I remember those roadmap meetings well.
...we made sure to build CedarDB to be compatible with PostgreSQL.
You "made sure." I can practically hear the weary sigh of the lead engineer who was told that, yes, you do have to perfectly replicate all 30 years of features, quirks, and undocumented behaviors of pg_catalog, but you have to do it by next quarter. And no, you can't have more headcount.
This "compatibility" is always a fun little adventure. It's like a meticulously crafted movie set. From the front, it looks exactly like a bustling 19th-century city. But walk behind the facades and you’ll find it’s all just plywood, two-by-fours, and a stressed-out crew member frantically trying to stop the whole thing from collapsing in a light breeze. The compatibility usually works great, until you try to do something crazy like:
JOIN.pg_stat_statements.EXPLAIN plan and expect it to reflect reality.READ COMMITTED with a trench coat and a fake mustache.It’s a truly commendable marketing move, though. You get to ride the coattails of a beloved, battle-hardened brand while papering over the countless compatibility caveats and performance pitfalls that litter your codebase like forgotten TODO comments. It’s a classic case of "close enough for the demo, but not for production."
Honestly, bravo, CedarDB. A truly masterful piece of prose that perfectly captures the current state of our industry: a relentless race to reinvent the wheel, but this time, make it square, paint it green, and call it Postgres-compatible.
It's just... so tiring. Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go read the actual Postgres docs to remember what a real database looks like.