Five years ago you'd use Postgres + MongoDB + Elasticsearch + Redis + Pinecone. In 2024, Postgres alone often covers all of it.
What Postgres now does well
- JSON / JSONB — schema-flexible documents with indexing
- Full-text search — built-in, good enough for most apps without Elastic
- Vectors — pgvector + HNSW indexes are production-ready
- Queues — SKIP LOCKED makes Postgres a perfectly fine job queue
- Time-series — TimescaleDB extension competes with InfluxDB
- Partitioning — declarative table partitioning for billion-row tables
Hosted choices in 2024
- Supabase — Postgres + auth + storage + realtime
- Neon — serverless Postgres with branching
- RDS / Aurora — AWS workhorses, mature
- Cloud SQL — GCP equivalent
- Crunchy Bridge — managed Postgres without the lock-in
Bottom line
Default to Postgres. Add a second data store only when Postgres genuinely can't do the job — which is rarer than you'd think.