PostgreSQL by Default, and When I Don't Use It

Postgres is my default datastore because it does almost everything well: relational integrity, JSONB for flexibility, full-text search, and a rock-solid query planner. Reaching for something exotic should require justification, not the reverse.

I deviate when the workload demands it — time-series at scale, multi-tenant sharding, or document-heavy access patterns. Even then I check whether a Postgres extension solves it before adding a new system to operate.

Every database you run is an on-call burden. Fewer, well-understood systems beat a zoo of specialized stores you can't all reason about at 3 a.m.