Every few months someone writes a clean, slightly stubborn essay that amounts to: what if we just used PostgreSQL for more of the architecture?
Queues. Documents. Full text. Geospatial. Analytics adjacent to the app. Job state. Feature flags. The comment section then splits into two camps: people who have been burned by polyglot sprawl, and people who have been burned by one database asked to do circus tricks.
I land closer to the first camp, with scars from both.
The real cost was never the second database
The second database looks cheap on a whiteboard. It is "just Redis." It is "just Elasticsearch." It is "just another managed service with a cute dashboard."
