Postgres for Everything, Until It Isn't
October 20–23
PostgreSQL is a general-purpose transactional engine. Its row store, WAL, MVCC, vacuum and constraint enforcement are tuned for OLTP and that same machinery carries a cost for append-heavy telemetry, large analytical scans or datasets that live in object storage. Running everything on Postgres is possible but past a certain scale it often means adding partitioning, replicas, extensions and caching layers to fit workloads the core engine was not optimized for.
Many architectures are becoming compositional: PostgreSQL as the transactional source of truth with specialized systems for specialized access patterns. Columnar engines like ClickHouse are faster at analytical aggregation, Apache Kafka is built for durable event streams and dedicated search and graph engines optimize for different execution models. Choosing the storage and compute model that fits the workload is not anti-Postgres; it is matching the tool to the access pattern.
The PostgreSQL ecosystem reflects this. Extensions such as pg_search, pg_lake, pg_duckdb and pg_clickhouse embed external execution engines like Tantivy, DuckDB and ClickHouse directly into PostgreSQL workflows. These are strong engineering efforts and they point to the same reality: different workloads benefit from different execution models. ClickHouse aggregates over billions of rows faster not because it is better software but because columnar storage, late materialization and vectorized execution suit analytical work better than a row-oriented engine. In these setups PostgreSQL increasingly acts as a transactional control plane and SQL interface while specialized systems handle execution paths that differ from OLTP.
This talk looks at where PostgreSQL's execution model excels, where it starts to strain operationally at scale and why compositional data architectures are emerging around PostgreSQL rather than replacing it. The goal is not to argue against PostgreSQL but to understand its boundaries, where they matter operationally and how the ecosystem is evolving around them.
