Re: Describing the natural architecture for an internet-facing Postgres based app: feedback sought

On Tue, 2026-04-28 at 13:24 +1000, guyren@relevantlogic.com wrote:

Coming from a Rails/PHP/etc world. All of those communities generally hold that
the database should be treated as a dumb data bucket with all the logic in the middleware.

I’ve long thought someone should write up what the alternative architecture using
Postgres to its fullest would look like. In order to differentiate it, I start from
the security advantages and work forward.

I’d love to get some feedback on it. Harsh criticism is most useful… :-)

No harsh critizism, but I am wary of all extremist positions.
Just as I think that it is silly to keep the database as dumb as possible,
I doubt that it is a good position to put all the smarts into the database.

One obvious disadvantage is that if you put much of the processing into
the database, most of the load will be on the database server, which is
difficult to scale.

Why not let each component do what it is best at?

Yours,
Laurenz Albe