These days, I do myself a favor and always avoid Oracle and MySql/MariaDB.

Postgres is amazing, and the two big things I wished it had:

1. lightweight connection; connection bouncers improve the situation, but you still have an unreasonably high memory footprint per concurrent connection.

2. Synchronously updated materialized views (Sql Server calls them indexed views). These are incredible tools in complex data situations. I saw a project struggle with complex technical implementations that would be elegant, trivial and always correct with indexed views.

Sql Server can be costly, but in many cases the benefits it provides are totally worth the cost.

Choosing the data store carefully prevents lots of future trouble.

(LLM writing rant below)

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> That alone tells you something: Users had a real need, and the ecosystem filled the gap.

> This sounds straightforward, but it solves a real operational problem.

> None of these change the world. All of them make day-to-day data workflows better.

> The easy thing to do here is list planner changes and call it done. But the more useful takeaway is this: Postgres keeps getting better at recognizing the shape of common queries and doing less unnecessary work.

> [Proceed to list planner changes]

If Orwell were alive today, he might declare himself illiterate in English and learn Klingon just to avoid having to read these.

SELECT customer_name FROM GRAPH_TABLE (myshop MATCH (c IS customers)-[IS customer_orders]->(o IS orders WHERE o.ordered_when = current_date) COLUMNS (c.name AS customer_name));

That is _awful_ syntax; it is reminiscent of neo4j, which is surely not a tool anyone serious should copy from outright in 2026.

And of course the final thing I am left wondering is if it's fast. Row-level security is such a useful feature and yet only a fool would contemplate building anything serious with Postgres', as the planner goes haywire and does per-row-matching, nuking performance.

> Several of these features were first introduced by DuckDB, while some are inspired by other systems. Many of the features originally introduced by DuckDB (e.g., GROUP BY ALL) have been since adapted by other systems.

https://duckdb.org/docs/lts/sql/dialect/friendly_sql

Something like rocksdb as PG backend would be fantastic. Yugabyte does this but it's not PG.