Re: Case Studies for PostgresSQL

> Hello People,
>
> I want to evaluate some of the open source database to use in my billing
> system of Telecommunication Company. Can somebody point me a Case Studies
in
> PostgreSQL?.
> Can PostgreSQL really handle this kind of sytem? Im using Linux Box in my
> server. There will be 500,000 average inserts in a month and 1,000,000
query every month . My tentative
> choice are Interbase 6.0 or PostgreSQL 7. Please give me insight with this
> one.
>
> Ian

In short, yes, it can.

I recently had the opportunity to test a 4 x Xeon machine that we built
(around $6,000) as our database server to an Alpha machine ($25,000). Both
of them were pretty close to what you're looking for.

To start out, let me say that this Xeon machine only had 400 Mhz
processors, and the secondary cache on them was disabled - so with any
relatively modern processor, the performance would be much, much higher. It
does have a fairly decent RAID array (5 disks in RAID 5 across 2 channels).

To test it, we logged our real-world queries for a night, and I selected
1,000 distinct queries from that list. I launched 20 simultaneous
processes, each of which executed the 1,000 queries, enough to drive the
system load out the roof. : )

The Xeon machine finished the test in 90 minutes, giving us 3.7
transactions per second, or 0.27 seconds per query.

On average, your machine needs to handle 0.38 selects per second, about
1/10th of what our machine did. However, our processors are slow, and the
secondary cache is completely disabled (a weird technicality, soon to be
remedied). With any relatively modern processors, and maybe a few more
disks on the machine, you should be sitting pretty.

If you don't feel like building the machine yourself, the Alpha that I
tested was about 50% faster, but at three times the cost.

steve