Re: PostgreSQL a slow DB?

On April 9, 2006 07:02 am, "Relaxin" <me(at)yourhouse(dot)com> wrote:
> That doesn't really help anwser the question...
> The developers in our office (and myself) are also under the impression
> that PG is a very slow database.
> Also when you look thru the "performance" newsgroup, it seems to me that
> what people are saying is true.

Like every database, PostgreSQL has some operations which are slower than
others. Some of these are things that developers, having experienced MySQL
in a development environment, might find to be much slower than MySQL. In
particular, UPDATEs and COUNT(*) are very slow compared to MySQL on MyISAM
tables. People also constantly run into problems from not VACUUMing their
tables (setup autovacuum first-thing), and by not tuning their installation
to their system (the default configuration is very conservative).

In practice, if setup and maintained correctly and and while used by
multiple users, PostgreSQL is actually quite fast, and it consistently gets
faster every release. 6.5 was a dog. Since 7.0, it's been quite usable,
and the 8.0 and 8.1 releases are awesome. People who looked at PostgreSQL
8 or 9 years ago and wrote it off as slow don't know what they're missing.

In addition, it has a lof of very nice features that other free products
lack, and it is incredibly good about protecting the integrity and
correctness of your data (something that MySQL is famously bad at, and the
reason many users of other databases hold MySQL in such disdain).

I think if you try both products, under any kind of concurrent read/write
load, especially if you use MySQL in a non-default manner that actually
guarantees safe data (ie. with InnoDB or at least by turning fsync on),
you will find that PostgreSQL compares quite favourably speed-wise, while
at the same time being just a much nicer product to work with.

This is of course just my opinion. I invite you to try the product before
dismissing it based on what some other people have to say.

--
Alan