Since that time, the architecture of Uber has changed significantly, to a model of microservices and new data platforms.

The early architecture of Uber consisted of a monolithic backend application written in Python that used Postgres for data persistence.

Fun fact - earlier in Uber's history we'd actually moved from MySQL to Postgres before switching back for good, & though we published the article in Summer 2016 we haven't looked back since: In essence, it was due to a variety of limitations of Postgres at the time. Our most popular (& controversial!) article to date on the Uber Engineering blog in 3+ yrs. We use its excellent built-in full-text search, which has helped us avoid needing to bring in a tool like Elasticsearch, and we've really enjoyed features like its partial indexes, which saved us a lot of work adding unnecessary extra tables to get good performance for things like our 'unread messages' and 'starred messages' indexes.

As a result, we were able to delete a bunch of custom queries escaping the ORM that we'd written to make the MySQL query planner happy (because postgres just did the right thing automatically).Īnd then after that, we've just gotten a ton of value out of postgres. We didn't have to do any real customization (just some tuning settings for how big a server we had), and all of our most important queries were faster out of the box. We ended up getting so frustrated that we tried out PostgresQL, and the results were fantastic. Issues ranged from bad collation defaults, to bad query plans which required a lot of manual query tweaks. However, we found that even though we were using the Django ORM for most of our database access, we spent a lot of time fighting with MySQL. Zulip started out as a MySQL project back in 2012, because we'd heard it was a good choice for a startup with a wide community.

We've been using PostgreSQL since the very early days of Zulip, but we actually didn't use it from the beginning.

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