i love postgresql but once we added ai-generated dashboard to our homegrown analytics tool [0] some of the crazy (amazing) dashboards that the ops team was building began accumulating horrendously slow db queries. I considered dynamically adding indexes or alerting around postgres slow queries but also quickly prototyped mirroring the postgres data in clickhouse. At first could not believe how fast clickhouse was on arbitrary analytics queries - like 60s to 0.5s for some gnarly queries. truly amazing software that just works without any tuning for this kind of exploratory analytics workload.

so yes, i'm still a postgres maximalist (worker queues still in pg [1]) but (especially in the age of quick LLM prototypes) it's always worth measuring the more purpose-built approach.

[0]: https://setoku.com

[1]: https://worker.graphile.org