This is version 1 of 3, as it read on September 14, 2026. Read the latest Every version
The boring database is the fast one
Most systems do not need a new kind of storage. They need the old kind, understood properly.
Every few months someone on a team I work with proposes a new database. The reasons are always good ones on the surface: the current one is slow, the data does not fit neatly in tables, the new thing scales horizontally. And almost every time, when we look closely, the slowness is not the database. It is how we are asking it for things.
What slow usually means
When a query is slow, the first question is not “which engine” but “what is it doing”. Postgres will tell you, in detail, if you ask:
EXPLAIN (ANALYZE, BUFFERS)
SELECT * FROM orders
WHERE customer_id = 42
ORDER BY created_at DESC
LIMIT 20;Nine times out of ten the answer is a sequential scan over a table that has grown past the point where scanning it was free. That is not a reason to leave Postgres. It is a missing index.
The case for boring
A database you have run for five years is a database whose failure modes you know. You know how it behaves when the disk fills, what its backups look like, and how long a restore takes. A new system arrives with none of that knowledge, and you will learn it at three in the morning.
Boring is not the absence of ambition. It is the decision to spend your ambition on the part of the product people actually see.