Re: Probable faq: need some benchmarks of pgsql vr.s mysql

Brian,

> My company is currently hitting a problem with mysql/innodb having
> really slow insert performance (we're seeing ~1K rows/second).

As others have said, there's clearly something wrong with your setup
and/or application which would likely affect PostgreSQL as well. I can
name several ways in which PostgreSQL is better than MySQL/InnoDB, but
insert performance isn't one of them.

>My boss
> wants to go and spend a bunch of money on the Tokutek backend.

I'm sure that Tokutek would be thrilled to have a customer (they're very
new). Again, though, insert performance isn't Tokutek's specialty; the
arguments for using them is that (a) they're not owned by oracle, and
(b) the "fractal indexes", which are cool.

> I've googled around for a while, but all the benchmarks I've found
> commit one or more "fatal flaws", which render the benchmark pointless
> at best:

Doing real benchmarks is an involved, expensive process, and both DBMSes
are fast-moving targets which need to be benchmarked every year. I've
talked with Percona about doing some MySQL vs. PostgreSQL head-to-heads,
but in the absence of specific funding that's unlikely to be completed.
Besides, we both really want to do head-to-heads with MSSQL & Oracle,
not each other.

> Here's the thing. I have personally seen postgres 8.1 insert 30K
> rows/second, in to a real table, on crappy hardware (single slow IDE
> drive, old crappy hardware). I would be shocked if I can't improve on
> the InnoDB numbers by at least an order of magnitude. I'm whipping
> together a personal benchmark to show this. But I need a "professional
> looking" benchmark, with pretty charts and graphs and etc., to back me up.

Don't have anything like that, I'm afraid. Last real benchmark was
SpecJAppserver from 2007 (which at the time was 90% of comparable Oracle
performance), which has long been superceded.

However, given that what you want to know about is insert performance,
it seems like it would be easy enough to mock up your own comparison.

--
-- Josh Berkus
PostgreSQL Experts Inc.
http://www.pgexperts.com