Think of your database like your home. Your home has a living room, bedroom, bathroom, kitchen, and garage. Each room serves a different purpose. But they're all under the same roof, connected by hallways and doors. You don't build a separate restaurant building just because you need to cook. You don't construct a commercial garage across town just to park your car.
That's what Postgres is. One home with many rooms. Search, vectors, time-series, queues—all under one roof.
But this is exactly what specialized database vendors don't want you to hear. Their marketing teams have spent years convincing you to "use the right tool for the right job." It sounds reasonable. It sounds wise. And it sells a lot of databases.
Let me show you why it's a trap and why Postgres is the better choice in 99% of cases.
The “Use the Right Tool” Trap
You’ve heard the advice: “Use the right tool for the right job.”
Sounds wise. So you end up with:
Elasticsearch for search Pinecone for vectors Redis for caching MongoDB for documents Kafka for queues InfluxDB for time-series PostgreSQL for… the stuff that’s left
Congratulations. You now have seven databases to manage. Seven query languages to learn. Seven backup strategies to maintain. Seven security models to audit. Six sets of credentials to rotate. Seven monitoring dashboards to watch. And seven things that can break at 3 AM.
And when something does break? Good luck spinning up a test environment to debug it.
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