Re: New to PostgreSQL, performance considerations

Gene,

at Postgres's docs they say that the "constraint checks are relatively
expensive". From what you're saying, it's really worth studying the
matter deply first.

I never understood what's the matter between the ASCII/ISO-8859-1/UTF8
charsets to a database. They're all simple C strings that doesn't have
the zero-byte in the midlle (like UTF16 would) and that doesn't
require any different processing unless you are doing case insensitive
search (them you would have a problem).

ASCII chars are also correct UTF8 chars as well. The first 127 Unicode
chars are the same as the ASCII chars. So you would not have any
problems changing your table from ASCII to UTF8. My software uses
UTF16 and UTF8 at some of it's internals and I only notice performance
problems with UTF16 (because of the zero-byte thing, the processing I
make is diferent). So, I imagine that you wouldn't have any
performance issues changing from ASCII to UTF8 if necessary.

Nowadays everything is turning to Unicode (thank god). I wouldn't
start anything with any other charset. I would only be asking for a
rewrite in a near future.

Best,
Daniel

On 12/10/06, Gene <genekhart(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
> I'm using gentoo as well, I'm having performance issues as the number of
> partitions is increasing I imagine do due to overhead managing them and
> figuring out where to put each insert/update. I'm switching to weekly
> partitions instead of daily. I believe in PG8.2 constraint exclusion works
> with updates/deletes also so I'm eager to upgrade. I get about 1 million
> records per day in two tables each, each record updated about 4 times within
> 30 minutes.
>
> Do you think using UTF8 vs US-ASCII hurts performance signficantly, some of
> my smaller tables require unicode, and I don't think you can have some
> tables be unicode and some be ASCII.