Re: PostgreSQL a slow DB?

Sheesh, the day after I unsubscribe due to lack of time I get this
email. Before you take some anecdotal words on the subject, think about
it. MySQL is fine for running some databases for websites and webapps.
SQLLite is also. But they do not scale the way PostgreSQL does. Are
these people comparing some measly little Wordpress database running
MySQL against a huge Postgres database with a ton of data and a ton of
stored-proc functionality coded into it?

I would need to see apples-to-apples benchmarks done by comparing the
various database systems running the same or very similar databases.
And do it for small-size databases all the way up through large ones, to
see how well they all perform as you increase the scale. Oh, and you
may have to dumb down the benchmark schema used to account for all the
functionality that PostgreSQL has that don't exist in the others.

We once, at a customer's insistence, ported a fairly complex schema with
a lot of stored proc functionality from PostgreSQL to Oracle. Its was
based on managerial fiat, not from some technical reason. It was very
time consuming and difficult. There were just so many features that we
made use of that Oracle had no counterpart for, and we had to write a
lot of custom code to implement.

If you have a tiny database, with tiny requirements, and have to run on
old, slow equipment, then maybe it doesn't matter what database you use,
they'll all perform the same. But if you need to do real work, I'll
take PostgreSQL.

The only time I've heard of or experienced speed issues was in the days
of running Postgres on Windows via cygwin. And the culprit there was
cygwin, not Postgres. Cygwin is slow. Its not meant for that kind of
production use. Postgres would have to run on top of it and suffered
from cygwin's slowness. But these days Postgres runs native on
Windows. I don't have to run Postgres on Windows anymore, so I don't
know how the native Win32 Postgres performs, but with cygwin out of the
loop it should be fine.

Perhaps the many rumblings you heard were from people still dealing with
cygwin on Windows?

McC

Bruce Momjian wrote:
> ebcorder(at)rockwellcollins(dot)com wrote:
>
>> Hi All
>>
>> I started using PostgreSQL\Postgis in January. Lately I have been
>> reading on the internet many rumblings about PostgreSQL being slower than
>> MySQL/SQLLite etc etc. Comparisons made were routine inserts , updates,
>> and deletes. Is any of this true? If so,are there methods to speed
>> things up? I used the Explain Analyze command on portgesSQL it seemed
>> fast although I have not run any other DB's.
>> I know when comparison tests are performed they can be tilted on these
>> internet sites. But I see so many people declaring PostgreSQL to be the
>> slowest I am thinking where there is smoke there's fire.
>>
>
> Lots of people still think Elvis is alive. :-)
>
>