I love projects where I’m learning something new, don’t you? When I get in a project, I want to be learning new things on a regular basis, otherwise I grow restless. Lately, I’ve been on a pretty big project for a client designing a backend system (GraphQL + Node.js + Postgres). I can’t go into too much detail, but we’ve leveraged Postgres as our main data store and in the process we’ve had to level up on our Postgres skills. This post consists of random notes about PG that I didn’t know a few months ago.

I love PostgreSQL, always have. I remember, it was easily more than a decade ago, when I first ran into PostgreSQL (PG). It seemed all major open source projects used MySQL. When I learned PG was also open source, plus had more SQL compliant features, I knew it would someday become the de facto open source database. At the time, the client tools, support, and pure speed were not there, but the foundation for a great product existed.

Back in 2012, there was a new way to build web apps fast and packed full of features. It was MEAN. MongoDB, Express, Angular, and Node. I built a number of apps with this technology, and it worked. However, as time passed they began to show their weaknesses. Today we’ll look at a few lessons learned from MongoDB.