PostgreSQL's MVCC is bad. So is everyone else's.

The first thing you will probably learn about Postgres, if you follow people who don't like Postgres, is that MVCC is bad. The 40-year-old design mistake. It's signatures are everywhere. Bloated tables that double in size, 32-bit transaction counter limit, the never ending struggle with VACCUM, dead tuples nightmares. It comes with credentials, too: Uber measured the write amplification in 2016 and left for MySQL over it; Andy Pavlo's database group called MVCC the part of PostgreSQL they hate the most. It's a real thing. Postgres is as bad as it gets. While none of this is exaggerated, it comes down to a real design choice. The bloat, the amplified writes, the vacuum babysitting: every charge traces to a decision, not a defect, and we reproduce each one below on a live PostgreSQL 19 beta2 instance, so you can watch the damage happen yourself. But the verdict that spreads from community to community always stops one question early: compared to what? What does every other engine do…