The magic of Postgres (and, quite arguably, MySQL, SQLite, etc.) is simply the idea that a sophisticated RDBMS is ubiquitous.<p>I came from the Old Days when we had to chisel BASIC code into cooling silicon. Having something like a SQL RDBMS just sitting there, busy, or not, maybe just wasting away, ready for any weird nonsense you throw at it, is just a treasure.<p>I have postgres on my mac. I've had postgres on my mac since I've had a Mac, so, what, 2006? I still have DBs on there that are now pushing 17 years old (after several PG version upgrades). I have the space, no reason to delete them. Just there. Old projects, strange experiments, idle.<p>That I have this much capability languishing is amazing.<p>SQL databases used to be a Big Deal. They were large step up from hand coding B-Tree indexes. I remember once we got a call from a client complaining about performance on a system we installed. We popped in, took a look around, and, yea, we dropped the ball. Not a single index was created on their system. It was just the tables. No wonder it was slowing down. 10 minutes of mad index creation later, all was well.<p>If you weren't there in those days, it's remarkable that we had a system where indexes were (mostly) a performance thing, rather than a core thing the entire system was designed around. A paradigm shift in development.<p>SQL DBs were amazing. They were also rare, and expensive. Custom libraries to access them, etc. But also, generic query tools, no code to write to beat on the data, or dump out quick queries, just the SQL front end. Powerful. Capable. So, yea, I held them on a bit of a pedestal.<p>And I can now just let one of those things, with untold modern capability and range, just sit idle on my machine. Just like I can leave a Calculator window open. Waiting for whenever I deign I need to work with it some.<p>Extraordinary.