Last Phriday we explored just where Postgres could end up in the future. One possible question which may have occurred to a reader was probably something along the lines of “That doesn’t even really sound like Postgres anymore. Why not just write another database?”
Let’s just be outright about it: Postgres is the best RDBMS engine currently available. It’s certainly bold to claim that any database engine is “the best”, and as the saying goes, “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
What is High Availability to Postgres? I’ve staked my career on the answer to that question since I first presented an HA stack to Postgres Open in 2012, and I still don’t feel like there’s an acceptable answer. No matter how the HA techniques have advanced since then, there’s always been a nagging suspicion in my mind that something is missing.
But I’m here to say that a bit of research has uncovered an approach that many different Postgres cloud vendors appear to be converging upon.
When it comes to reordering the items in a list, databases have long had a kind of Faustian Bargain to accomplish the task. Nobody really liked any of the more common solutions, least of all the poor database tasked with serving up the inevitable resulting hack.
Postgres is no different in this regard. Consider a list_item table like this, demonstrating five items in a to-do list:
Potential layoffs are a persistent fixture in some industries, like some kind of Sword of Damocles looming over them in perpetuity. With the recent advances in AI and the weak economy battering industries of all description, the rate is only accelerating. Perhaps anecdotally, Tech is one of the worst affected in the current climate, with nearly 50k laid off already in 2024 alone, and over 250k in 2023 according to the Layoff Tracker.
I’ve been thinking of adding a Kanban board to my site for a more advanced TODO list. So far I’ve looked at:
Kanboard - Interesting and right now the main contender. It’s fast, easy to set up, and can use Postgres. It’s somewhat ugly, and the existing themes are few and far-between. It’s also PHP, which isn’t winning it any points. Also, every single theme breaks the code syntax highlighting in the hover tool-tip of the Board view.
