>The claim is that it handles 80%+ of their use cases with 20% of the development effort. (Pareto Principle)
The Pareto principle is not some guarantee applicable to everything and anything saying that any X will handle 80% of some other thing's use cases with 20% the effort.
One can see how irrelevant its invocation is if we reverse: does Kafka also handle 80% of what Postgres does with 20% the effort? If not, what makes Postgres especially the "Pareto 80%" one in this comparison? Did Vilfredo Pareto had Postgres specifically in mind when forming the principle?
Pareto principle concerns situations where power-law distributions emerge. Not arbitrary server software comparisons.
Just say Postgres covers a lot of use cases people mindlessly go to shiny new software for that they don't really need, and is more battled tested, mature, and widely supported.
The Pareto principle is a red herring.
I do not understand your position. I think it's a bit confused.
>The Pareto principle is not some guarantee applicable to everything and anything
Yes, obviously. The author doesn't say otherwise. There are obviously many ways of distributing things.
>One can see how irrelevant its invocation is if we reverse: does Kafka also handle 80% of what Postgres does with 20% the effort?
No
>If not, what makes Postgres especially the "Pareto 80%" one in this comparison?
Because its simpler.
What implies everything can handle 80% of use cases with 20% of effort? It's like saying:
If normal distributions are real, and human height is normally distributed, then why isnt personal wealth? They are just different distributions.
>I do not understand your position.
Let me explain then...
> Yes, obviously. The author doesn't say otherwise.
Someone doesn't need to spell something out explicitly to imply it, or to fall to the kind of mistake I described.
While the author might not say otherwise, they do invoke the Pareto principle out of context, as if it's some readily applicable theorem.
>>If not, what makes Postgres especially the "Pareto 80%" one in this comparison? > Because its simpler.
Something being simpler than another thing doesn't make it a Pareto "80%" thing.
Yeah, I know you don't say this is always the case explicitly. But, like with the OP, your answer uses this as if it's an argument in favor of smething being the "Pareto 80%" thing.
It just makes it simpler. In the initial Pareto formulation is was about wealth accumulation even, which has nothing to do with simplicity or features or even with comparing different classes of things (both sides referred to the same thing, people. Specifically about 20% of the population owning 80% of the land).
Where do they imply the Pareto principle is the only type of distribution?
The author's claim is that postgres handles 80% of the use cases with 20% of the effort. It does not follow, as you recognize, that therefor EVERYTHING handles 80% of the uses cases with 20% of the effort. Where does the author imply that it does? Based on his characterization of Kafka I think he's say it solves a minority of use cases with a lot more effort.
I mean isnt this the explicitly made point by the author? That Kafka's use-case/effort distribution is different (worse)?
Is the mapping of use cases to software functionality not a power law distribution? Meaning there are a few use cases that have a disproportionate affect on the desired outcome if provided by the software?
It probably applies better to users of software, e.g. 80% of users use just 20% of the features in Postgres (or MS Word). This probably only works, roughly, when the number of features is very large and the number of users is very large, and it's still very very rough, kinda obviously. (It could well be 80% / 5% in these cases!)
For very simple software, most users use all the features. For very specialized software, there's very few users, and they use all the features.
> The claim is that it handles 80%+ of their use cases with 20% of the development effort. (Pareto Principle)
This is different units entirely! Development effort? How is this the Pareto Principle at all?
(To the GP's point, would "ls" cover 80% of the use cases of "cut" with 20% of the effort? Or would MS Word cover 80% of the use cases of postgresql with 20% of the effort? Because the scientific Pareto Principle tells us so?)
Hey, it's really not important, just an idea that with Postgres you can cover a lot of use cases with a lot less effort than configuring/maintaining a Kafka cluster on the side, and that's plausible. It's just that some "nerds" who care about being "technically correct" object to using the term "pareto principle" to sound scientific here, that bit is just nonsense.
You might be right, but does anyone have data to support that hypothesis?
I believe the Pareto principle is used more of a figure of speech nowadays, it doesn't mean the 80 to 20 ratio literally. When I hear someone invoking the principle I tend to think of it as: this should solve the problem enough for our case and with less (usually much less) work than a complete solution.
yeah, this was my intention. I have no real way of knowing if it truly covers 80% of use cases, or 70%, or 40%, anyway.
> if we reverse: does Kafka also handle 80% of what Postgres does with 20% the effort?
First, it would be inverse, not reverse.
Second, no it doesn't work that way, that's the point of the Pareto principle in the first place, what is 80% is always 80% and what is 20% is always 20%.
>Second, no it doesn't work that way, that's the point of the Pareto principle in the first place, what is 80% is always 80% and what is 20% is always 20%.
I know, since that's the whole point I was making. That the OP picked an arbitrary side to give the 80%, and that one could just as well pick the other one, and that you need actual arguments (and some kind of actual measurable distribution) to support one or the other being the 80% (that is, merely invoking the Pareto principle is not an argument).