First "Real" Benchmark for PostgreSQL 275
anticlimate writes "A new benchmark published on SPEC shows PostgreSQL's performance approaching that of Oracle's and surpassing or on par with MySQL (however the test-hardwares of the other DB systems are somewhat different). The test was put together by PostgreSQL's core developers working at Sun. They certainly are not unbiased, but this is the first 'real' benchmark with PostgreSQL — according to Josh Berkus's blog. The main difference compared to earlier benchmarks (and anecdotes) seems to be the tuning of PostgreSQL."
I do not think it means what you think it means. (Score:5, Insightful)
Which makes the results pretty much useless. But, being the intrepid slashdotter I am, I went ahead and R'ed the FA anyway, in case I could glean some useful information from it.
Which revealed that the linked article doesn't actually contain any information whatsoever about Oracle* or MySQL, much less benchmarks on named hardware.
So...what am I supposed to get out of this, again? Or is this just supposed to be some kind of PostgreSQL love-in, so I should take my wet blanket elsewhere?
*Well, the second link contains someone claiming that Oracle is only 15% faster...but without providing any actual data.
Mod parent way up! (Score:3, Insightful)
Okay, if they can't match the hardware (why not?) then focus on price points. I notice that they're looking at "$65,500 for the hardware". That's a LOT of hardware at today's prices.
I'm sure MySQL would (and will) come back with a "benchmark" on hardware costing $10,000.
There is nothing "real" about this "benchmark".
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Inserting 20 million rows, all simple inserts, only one primary key (int) with autoincrement for mysql and a sequence for postgres:
Avg Mysql time per 1000 inserts: 3 seconds
Avg Postgres time per 1000 inserts: 15 seconds (and gets worse over time)
That was after increasing the caches and disabling fsync on postgres too.
I also did a delete then insert for both (to flush out already existing rows), with similar result
Re:Mod parent way up! (Score:5, Interesting)
Avg Mysql time per 1000 inserts: 3 seconds
Avg Postgres time per 1000 inserts: 15 seconds (and gets worse over time)
Re:Mod parent way up! (Score:4, Informative)
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Certainly postgres plays nice with self joins and natural joins as the query turned out faster than trying an iterative stored proc so we just access a view from the proc.
Re:Mod parent way up! (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:Mod parent way up! (Score:5, Interesting)
- A nice schema designed once upon a time properly by a proper DBD that is vandalised in the application abstraction layer because the developers are are sorely pissed off by the endless wingeing of the SQL server and/or its abissmal performance. So they take the matters in their own hands and violate ACID by cashing and bypassing restrictions in the app. Sooner or later someone comes around and says - WTF, why don't we rewrite this all in software and sod off the expensive database. And surprise surprise it ends up being done in MySQL.
- An abissmal schema or no schema at all where all restrictions are done in the app. That is MySQL country all the way.
MySQL is a result of the way current software development is taught and done. Unless Jo the Average Developer starts understanding how to use SQL in his application (and he does not) and unless SQL data representation grows up to modern non-fortran-like OO semantics MySQL will proliferate. And if you think that MySQL is bad think twice. There are the object persistence frameworks and in-memory crap that follow in its wake.Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
You do realize that in activities like reporting sql and its set-based operations are far, far, far faster and easier to work with than oo implementations, right?
You can set up a typical star-schema and have certain tools (like microstrategy) immediately recognize it and generate queries for you. These queries will typically perform just fine and allow very powerful and fast drill-downs, drill-across,
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Most developers nowdays go for a really trivial schema and an abstraction layer. At that point the only thing that matters is row speed on simple table operations and there MySQL or in-memory OO database frameworks with a simple backing store wipe the floor.
Until, of course, they don't. All it takes is a couple of users who want to actually get information *out* of the database ("How many widgets do we typically sell in Poughkipsie in March? And when I say 'Poughkipsie', I mean the greater Poughkipsie metroplex.") and you're stuck building indexes and making joins in your code. Eventually your code either becomes unmaintainable, or collapses under its own bulk. Agile/XP developers like the DRY axiom: Don't Repeat Yourself. Why write code to do what the d
Re:Mod parent way up! (Score:5, Insightful)
That is the problem - it does not in real life. Application works in developer hands, goes out in the field and breaks (seen that one time too many). Millions if not billions of dollars have been put to make sure that RDBMS transactions are atomic and preserve data integrity. No application level interface abstraction has ever afforded the expense and could ever afford the expense to do that. In every single instance I have looked at application developers replacing SQL ACID with "bake-their-own" system I have found cases of data integrity violations. In modern multithreaded (or web server based) apps the most common result from this is race conditions which are probably the hardest to debug problem in software.
The other common problem in using application level abstractions is performance. Once again - works in developer hands, goes in the field, gets real data loaded in it and all hell breaks lose. Similar reasons to ACID as the next biggest investment after data integrity in a database is in its ability to fine-grain lock data objects. If a developer tries to replace RDBMS locking in the application layer, he usually ends up with higher granularity lock that is more contended. In addition to that to avoid race conditions, developers usually deliberately create a bottleneck by muxing all RDBMs access to a single thread and a single access point to simplify locking. In fact probably one of the most beneficial uses of MySQL is its ability to support server-based fine-grained locks that are not tied to a specific data object. You can use these in global semaphors and global locking even in cases where POSIX locks do not work (f.e. across clusters).
Overall, yeah, MySQL and your app "already works". For Proof of Concept - maybe (in fact I use it myself). For real stuff - no, not really, unless you put a lot of work in the application layer. I have done that on quite a few occasions and the performance gains can be staggering compared to ACIDising your brain with a proper RDBMS, but the effort is hardly worth it in most real life scenarios. It also makes it considerably less maintainable.
Re:Mod parent way up! (Score:5, Interesting)
This is on 'decent' hardware running Solaris 10 (amd64). Obviously you need to tweak stuff like wal size, checkpoints, etc.. But getting this type of performance is not hard to do. I can scan an hours worth of data in a short amount of time. Each one of these 'hourly' tables contains roughly 30-32M rows. this is nothing to sneeze at from what I can tell. I haven't had a reason to re-evaluate mysql to see if there are enough tweaks to make it perform similarly, but if you're getting the crappy insert rate that you're talking about, you clearly need to change something as you're doing it wrong if you truly care about performance. E-Mail me if you're interested in my postgresql config files. I'm happy to share to minimize the FUD out there.
Re:Mod parent way up! (Score:5, Informative)
You can do way better than that with PostgreSQL, at least, and I suspect with MySQL as well. I wrote a benchmark similar to yours, but a good bit more complex. I had two tables, one of which was seeded and another which was populated by the benchmark. The benchmark table had six columns (int, timestamp, 4x bigint), a primary key (int + timestamp), four check constraints (on the bigints), a foreign key constraint (int, to the seeded table), and two indexes (one int, one timestamp). I would do a commit every 75k rows, with 24 such commits per iteration and 30 passes per benchmark run, so 54 million rows total. I also used a thread pool, and there are two reasons for that. First, some amount of parallelism improves DB performance. Second, it more accurately simulated our predicted usage patterns of the database. We ran my benchmark against PSQL and IBM DB2.
The results were interesting (at least, I thought they were). First, PSQL can only handle about 10 threads doing work at once. Past about 10 threads, the DB completely falls apart. DB2, however, could handle more busy threads than Linux could, with a very gradual (and linear) degradation in performance past about 25 threads. I stopped testing at 100 threads. Second, PSQL's inserts per second (IPS) rate cut in half by the end of the bechmark. DB2 followed a similar trend until about 5 million rows, at which point IPS went up to where it started and stayed there without moving. Third, DB2 was I/O-bound, whereas PSQL was CPU-bound. I suspect it's why DB2 was able to handle an order of magnitude greater concurrency: more threads just meant the CPUs had something to do while waiting on the disks. However, it does mean that PSQL might do better with faster CPUs, whereas DB2 would not (it'd just be able to handle more threads).
And the numbers: DB2 averaged 1100 IPS, PSQL 600. Note that for the first million rows or so PSQL was faster: it just eventually dropped down to ~400 IPS after ten million rows or so, killing the average. Of course, since this table would never have fewer than 54M rows - actually, it would typically have 160M - the IPS I got at the end was the one that mattered. Also, this was on a pretty weak server, at least for this kind of workload. With more (and faster) cores, more memory, and more spindles, I'm pretty sure you could increase those numbers by 50% or more. With tuning, perhaps that much again.
Re:Mod parent way up! (Score:5, Insightful)
You cannot compare benchmarks without SOMETHING standard between them.
The thing that's standard is the benchmarking software.
If I were to buy a database server, do I really care which component of the solution is providing me with the great performance, or do I just want the performance? At the end of the day the only thing that really matters is the performance that comes out of the box.
It doesn't really matter if "Postgresql" is faster than "MySQL", because they always run on a certain physical computer. What matters is "I need to accomplish X,Y and Z. I have A dollars to spend. Which solutions accomplishes X, Y and Z the best within my budget? You can't separate the software from the hardware and get an answer that's very meaningful.
This benchmark isn't the last word on anything. Even a benchmark run on the exact same hardware means very little if you have a 2 core machine instead of 8.
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I take your point in general, but this statement is somewhat misleading. While you can't separate software from hardware entirely, you can be in a situation where you have a given supply of hardware, and need to know how best to use it - which amounts to much the same thing.
In that situation, knowing how each piece of software performs on a specific platform may be excellent information for you to have.
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you can be in a situation where you have a given supply of hardware, and need to know how best to use it - which amounts to much the same thing.
Sure, but you're talking about a specific piece of hardware. Sometimes you DO have a given hardware box and need to find software that works well on it. But how is a benchmark run on a totally different piece of hardware going to help you?
Benchmarks like these might give you kind of general ideas about the software, like "postgresql is in the same class as Oracle
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I notice that they're looking at "$65,500 for the hardware".
Yes, but they are comparing it to $74,000 for Oracle's hardware. The part that worried me is that "all benchmark runs were extensively optimized by the Sun performance team, with the help of performance experts from the databases represented." And they said they spent 6 months optimizing it. My goal is to find the sweet spot that combines: Money, Performance, and Development (and Code Maintance) costs. If it's possible to get great performa
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You're missing the entire point of what he's saying.
When you see benchmarks run and comparisons made between different databases that are conducted by a single pe
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Re:I do not think it means what you think it means (Score:4, Insightful)
There are lies, damned lies and benchmarks.
Re:I do not think it means what you think it means (Score:5, Informative)
Here's a more useful one: All SPEC jAppServer2004 Results Published by SPEC [spec.org]
The benchmarks aren't standardized enough for any useful comparison. The hardware and configurations vary in almost every one.
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Re:I do not think it means what you think it means (Score:5, Insightful)
Which makes the results pretty much useless.
Not necessarily.
It's essentially useless for separating out how much of the performance difference is the result of the software's design, implementation, and tuning versus how much is due to the platform differences.
But such tests CAN be used to examine the performance of competing ENTIRE SYSTEMS, to inform choices between them.
They say: "Oracle on does THIS well, PostgreSQL on can be tuned so it does THAT well on the same benchmark."
This lets administrators (presuming they have access to the hardware info) get a bang-for-the-buck comparison.
For the rest of us, the interesting point is that PostgreSQL, running on its team's idea of realistic hardware, can produce performance in the same ballpark as Oracle running on Oracle's choice of hardware.
(Whether the necessary remaining data (what are hardwares x and y? how was PostgreSQL tunde) is published now, later, or never, is a separate issue. B-) )
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They say: "Oracle on {hardware x} does THIS well, PostgreSQL on {hardware y} can be tuned so it does THAT well on the same benchmark."
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Think of it as marrying Oracle Corporation. (Score:2)
Re:I do not think it means what you think it means (Score:4, Insightful)
But what's been presented here isn't even that. Links #1 takes us to a SPEC benchmark of PostgreSQL. It doesn't provide any information about anything else; there isn't anything to compare the benchmark to. Link #2 provides an unreferenced statement about Oracle's marginally superior performance on much more expensive equipment.
So, perhaps, one can begin to draw conclusions about PostgreSQL vs Oracle in the contexts of full systems. But neither link #1 nor link #2 provide any information about MySQL (except the quote: "[t]his publication shows that a properly tuned PostgreSQL is not only as fast or faster than MySQL").
Really, my criticism isn't of the benchmark (the data are the data, after all) or of the blog (one expects a vested PostgreSQL interest to comment on such a benchmark), but of the blurb here that either a) draws totally unwarranted conclusions, or b) depends on information it doesn't bother sharing.
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(Whether the necessary remaining data (what are hardwares x and y? how was PostgreSQL tunde) is published now, later, or never, is a separate issue. B-) )
From the SPEC site [spec.org], click on the "Disclosures" links to find out the hardware and software used for each part of the test. For instance, the postgres server ran on a SunFire T2000 with one 8 core (4 virtual threads per core) UltraSPARC T1 processor at 1.2GHz, 16GB of ram running 64-bit solaris 10, etc. The HTML Disclosure links to the "Disclosure Archive" which is a .jar with all of the configuration files used.
Re:I do not think it means what you think it means (Score:2)
The best way to truly compare (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:The best way to truly compare (Score:4, Interesting)
Well, no technical trouble, anyway — I doubt Oracle would like to have its performance compared to two free-as-in-beer competitors. Even if it comes out on top, people will still be tempted to think "Jeez, with the money I save on Oracle licenses, I can buy a faster server and make up the speed difference"...
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Well yeah, especially since the primary metric for TPC-C isn't TPM (transactions per minute) but TPM/$. If the cost of Oracle means you could throw more hardware at the free DBs and get better overall
Good, but it can be improved. (Score:5, Interesting)
Let each team setup their systems how ever they want at each price point. Some will go with clustered servers. Some will go a single monster server. They know their products best so they'll be the ones best suited to choosing the configuration.
Then run the benchmarks. And keep hammering on them until AFTER the next patch release.
Yeah, it might run fast, but still be a bitch to patch/upgrade.
At $5,000 you might find that a cluster of MySQL boxes beats everything.
At $10,000 maybe something else is best.
$25,000
$50,000
$100,000
etc.
And finally, break it. Break it bad. What happens when something goes wrong? Oracle might cost a lot, but if they can come through with your data they might just be worth it.
If nothing else, you'll get the "best practices" nicely demonstrated by each group.
Re:Good, but it can be improved. (Score:5, Funny)
Let each team setup their systems how ever they want at each price point. Some will go with clustered servers. Some will go a single monster server. They know their products best so they'll be the ones best suited to choosing the configuration.
We gave each team $10000 and told them to build the best hardware and db setup they can:
** PostgreSQL got a small IBM Blade quad machine redundant setup:
"We're relying on standard industry solutions and reliability."
** MySQL clustered 4 PlayStation3 machines and wasted the rest on booze and women:
"We're practical, plus we know what is money best spent on!".
** Oracle purchased a 1200 square foot datacenter and installed a megacluster of 8132 quad-Xeon 64GB RAM 4TB disk machines. With $10'000...?!
"We... uhmm... we hit a great bargain, guys! You wouldn't believe it, but it's true!"
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1. Postgres runs on, among other things, linux, and windows.
2. SOLARIS runs on, among other things, x86.
3. MySQL and Oracle run on, among other things, Solaris on a Sparc.
There is a basis for identical comparisons. I've done it.
OTOH, you got this one right:
The true question on any business person's mind is "how much to implement?"
Re:The best way to truly compare (Score:4, Informative)
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Bad firehose! (Score:5, Informative)
The current version of PostgreSQL now has its first real benchmark [ittoolbox.com], a SPECjAppServer2004 [spec.org] submission [spec.org] from Sun Microsystems. The results required substantial tuning [sun.com] of many performance-related PostgreSQL parameters, some of which are set to extremely low values in the default configuration — a known issue that contributes to why many untuned PostgreSQL installations appear sluggish compared to its rivals. The speed result is close but slightly faster than an earlier Sun submission using MySQL 5 [spec.org] (with enough hardware differences to make a direct comparison of those results unfair), and comes close to keeping up with Oracle on similarly priced hardware — but with a large software savings. Having a published result on the level playing field of an industry-standard benchmark like SPECjAppServer2004, with documentation on all the tuning required to reach that performance level, should make PostgreSQL an easier sell to corporate customers who are wary of adopting open-source applications for their critical databases.
Re:Bad firehose! (Score:5, Insightful)
DUH! (Score:5, Insightful)
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What are the tuning parameters? (Score:2, Interesting)
I realize that a large part of the answer is going be "it depends on application, your hardware, and you query types", but surely there must be some general tips that we can follow given various typical setups. MySQL, for example, ships with several different configuration files: One suitable for a sm
We finally have PROOF (but not real proof) (Score:3, Informative)
MySQL 5 on AMD Opteron 285 [spec.org]
The UltraSPARC has 8 cores on 1 chip and 16GB of memory.
The Opteron has 4 cores and 8GB of memory.
The UltraSPARC should smoke it every time.
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Bias (Score:2)
I guess that's a deal breake right there, no?
The test was put together by PostgreSQL core developers at Sun. Didn't we agree earlier, when talking about Intel/AMD benchmarks, that vendor supplied tests are wildly inaccurate?
PostgreSQL should concentrate on more developer tools and better marketing. The "it's got a ton of features you don't need" on a cryptic site doesn't help its cause.
People use MySQL because there's a wide support and lots of dev tools for it, and because th
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For the features it provides I much prefer postgresql. sure, clustering is harder, but for the "easy" things that mysql is supposed to be good at, you don't need clustering either. O
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I don't know if the same holds true for PostgreSQL, but I would be extremely surprised since Pos
Elephant (Score:4, Funny)
"Dolphin" comes a bit closer.
Who's coming up with those logos?
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Which, of course, is what you want in a RDBMS.
Who's coming up with this education system?
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Which, of course, is what you want in a RDBMS.
Who's coming up with this education system?
--
I'm not convinced.
Dolphins are way smarter than elephants: we'll need an elephant/dolphin benchmark.
I'll get some monkeys to setup one.
Re:Elephant (Score:4, Insightful)
I'd prefer the elephant that never forgets.
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It's the shiznit for storing config data in small Linux appliances though
Which MySQL? (Score:5, Interesting)
MySQL is modular - pick'n'mix data storage engines sharing a SQL front end. I can't find the bit in TFA that says which one they compared.
I've always suspected that most MySQL vs Postgres flame wars are based on comparing Postgres with the speed of MySQL/MyISAM (No transactions or relational integrity checks - so, big surprise, dead fast for simple queries) and then waving MySQL/InnoDB around when the functionality issue is raised.
MySQL/MyISAM hits the speed/functionality sweet spot for LAMP data-driven websites, is supported by lots of free webapp software and offered by most decent web hosting services. Comparing it speedwise with Postgres has always been pointless, though. If Postgres has caught up, colour me impressed, but if they're pro-Postgres I bet they're comparing with MySQL/InnoDB (which is a bit closer to like-with-like).
Never quite seen the point of MySQL/InnoDB really - all the advantages of MySQL/MyISAM minus the speed, support by popular webapps, availbility on low-cost hosts... and still lacks the features of Postgres.
Re:Which MySQL? (Score:4, Informative)
The point IS pick'n'mix as you put it. [ from parent ]
I think this is a huge misconception, and completely backwards. MySQL allows you to change storage engines, but the behavior at the semantic level changes. That's the antithesis of modularity: the semantic behavior should remain constant, while the performance changes. If you change both, that's not modularity, that's a new configuration that breaks client applications.
MySQL is configureware, like PHP. Everything you get is a trade. Want full text indexes (MyISAM)? You have to give up transactions (InnoDB). But the marketing material always just says "Yup, we have full text indexes (MyISAM), SQL compliance (strict mode=on), transactions (InnoDB), large number of apps (strict mode=off)". Of course many of the features are mutually exclusive. When postgresql says it has a feature, it's really there.
Just need some in-memory lookups? Memory table engine. Clustered data? NDB.
Seems like the memory engine and NDB are the same thing: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/mysql-clus
Now compare with PostgreSQL. PostgreSQL has one "storage-engine", but there are many access methods to that storage engine. There's Btree, GiST, and GIN. On top of the access methods, there are also a lot of plans. There's sequential scan, index scan (good for lookups or some sorting needs), bitmap index scan (good for AND/OR with other bitmap index scans, and always orders the I/O in file order), hash join, hash aggregate, merge join, nested loop, group aggregate, etc.
Look at all those algorithms for accessing the single storage mechanism. It's amazing. MySQL doesn't have all those, and even if it did have the algorithms, it couldn't use them. How would MySQL know when to use a hash join and when to use a merge join? PostgreSQL collects statistics, calculates expected costs, and chooses the best plan based on the given query (called a cost-based planner). MySQL uses a rule-based planner (does it have an index? ok, let's use it then). To PostgreSQL, these two queries are different:
(1) SELECT * FROM parents WHERE number_of_children=2;
(2) SELECT * FROM parents WHERE number_of_children=20;
The stats collector would know that #1 will match many more records than #2. It will probably choose a sequential scan for #1, since it needs to read every page anyway. It will probably choose an index scan for #2. Now, if that's in a subselect, postgresql will know that #1 will return a lot of records, and maybe choose a different join algorithm than if it were #2. Again, PostgreSQL chooses these plans for you based on cost -- no special configuration required.
If you want modular, it's being able to replace a full text GiST index with a full text GIN index and the application never knows the difference except performance. And by the way, the DDL in postgresql is transactional, so you don't even have to restart the application even if you do some major restructuring of the table (like replacing a table with an updatable view).
I once did benchmarking (Score:5, Interesting)
Since it was more difficult to write Oracle-compliant SQL and we didn't have a lot of Oracle customers, the developers didn't care to spend time on it, and our stuff ran about 20 percent slower there. That's after a lot of tuning time, it was 50% slower on a default install. Oracle 9 took two days to install and tune, plus another two days of preparation. I was particularly underwhelmed that I had to deal with stupid errors like tarballs that extracted onto themselves and assumptions about the shell being used. At the time, Oracle was a very Solaris-like experience; user-unfriendly to the extreme.
Postgresql 7 ran great; it was neck and neck with MS-SQL in all tests, after proper tuning, and 30 percent slower on a default install. Postgres took half a day to install and tune, but it took me a week and conversation with the postgres mailing lists to find out what needed tuning. Still, we were able to put together a document that took users from bare metal to RHEL+Postgres in four hours if they had all their media handy.
Microsoft SQL Server 2000 ran great with no tuning at all, and took fifteen minutes to install. It also cost as much as paying me to do the entire set of tests. OS installation/patching times and tested workloads were the same for all three tests.
YMMV.
Re:on the playground... (Score:5, Funny)
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Of course... with InnoDB.
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MS licensed Sybase's database for Windows back in the late eighties/early nineties and eventually MS SQL Server grew out of that.
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Re:on the playground... (Score:5, Informative)
Um, no. DB2 [ibm.com] these days runs on most major UNIX variants (HP-UX, Solaris, AIX, IRIX, etc.), Linux and Windows. It's used quite often, in fact. Most Enovia/VPM installations use DB2 backends, for instance. Modern versions use XML along with regular relational database stores and are very, very up-to-date technology-wise. Very scalable.
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How exactly did that get modded informative if it's wrong?
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Actually, it's probably the fastest solution out there for heavy reporting/analytical workloads on windows, linux or unix. Not sure about teradata and informix - haven't looked at them in quite a while.
Teradata, informix and db2 were doing the 'beowulf' thing years before anyone on slashdot asked what a beowulf cluster of these would be like. So, you can easily distribute data across a hundre
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While DB2 does run on mainframes, it also runs on many other operating systems, including Linux.
http://www-306.ibm.com/software/data/db2/9/ [ibm.com]
As you can see, DB2 runs on at least Linux, Windows, and Solaris. It also runs on AIX, even though I didn't see it mentioned in a quick glance on the page. Please check your facts next time.
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Databases are even being used in many situations that would be better addressed using flat files.
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Now there's a good point. Is there any good documentation out there on databasing on what is the best solution for what kind of problem? Particularly, I would like to see something between flat-files and DBMS and then between different DBMS.
Though, technically, I'm stuck between whatever our 'host' is giving us (
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1. when you want to make sure something is always done despite lazy or even hostile users. You attach the SP to standard operations. E.g., it's common to set a 'last modified date' on every insert and update to a table. Depending on the DB you could even
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Here are your options:
A. flat file
B. key-indexed (berkley db, dbm, gdbm)
C. feature/config light db (sqlite)
D. feature/config heavy db (postgrsql, oracle)
* Use A for configuration
* Use A if you have a small amount of data and can slurp it all into memory.
* Use B if you only access data via a known unique value and never compare records.
* Never use either A or B if the data is shared between processes unless file locking is okay.
For anything else, use C
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"h4rdw4r3" is however an acceptable alternate spelling.
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> Does slashdot not have a "check spelling" feature on the submission page?
You must be new here.
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Absolutely! Of course, they don't really live in the same solution space so it's equally true to say that PostgreSQL is much faster than SQLite for many workloads.
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Better hope you never have to use Oracle.
Re:SQLite versus Postgres (Score:4, Funny)
apt-get install postgresql-server too hard for you? Or are you having trouble double-clicking on the
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"SQLite 2.7.6 is significantly faster (sometimes as much as 10 or 20 times faster) than the default PostgreSQL 7.1.3 installation on RedHat 7.2 for most common operations."
A drunken badger is 10 to 20 times faster than a default Postgres 7.1.3 installation. The 7.x branch, and particularly the early releases, had pretty bad performance (for this type of queries, at least) - they didn't really start sorting that out until 7.4
Isn't SQLite a bit of a toy th
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Re:performance isn't the issue (Score:5, Informative)
Do people really get that hung up on using postgres as the initial user instead of root?!? That is the ONLY difference that I can see.
Now I can agree that maybe postgresql doesn't really "target" an audience, but that is also because they are a true open source project. They don't have a commercial version. I really don't think Linus sits around saying "Ok, we need to add this feature so that more fortune 500's will adopt linux". Or "we need to add feature xyz so this will appeal to small businesses". MySQL has a "target" audience because they are selling something. If you aren't selling anything, by definition you don't have a target.
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Did you try installing it on Windows a couple years ago?
One reason MySQL quickly gained popularity is that they provided a Windows version early on. It took a long time before PostgreSQL finally got around to building a Win32 version with an installer. (Regardless of my opinions of running a database on Windows... the userbase is still huge).
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I'm in a similar situation except I use MySQL. Lets look at why.
1) Ease of use: MySQL has readline, and supports lazier SQL programming. It has loads of syntactic sugar that lets you write simple things in whatever way makes sense to you. Adding users, changing passwords, backing up... it is all _easy_. Of course, postgres can do everything MySQL can too, the question is which is easier.
2) Extensive developer community. We use python and the MySQL/python integration is great. We have a few U
Re:performance isn't the issue (Score:4, Insightful)
PostgreSQL's command-line shell is far better than mysql. In addition to what mysql does, psql supports tab-completion and other nice things. It's been a while since I looked at mysql, but when I did the difference between the two respective command-line interfaces was like the difference between bash and sh.
2) Extensive developer community. We use python and the MySQL/python integration is great. We have a few UDFs that are home-grown but some of them were just downloaded off the net and installed. I'm sure you can find far more for MySQL than for Postgres.
Uh-huh. You are "sure". Several times I asked for support on postgresql mailing lists and the response has always been excellent. Usually I got answers within hours.
I think one of the reasons that mysql became ubiquitous is that it had proper windows support early on. So, just like windows, everyone uses mysql because everyone else does, and they are willing to jump through hoops to work around all the deficiencies the platform has, simply because they don't know any better.
Re:performance isn't the issue (Score:5, Insightful)
Lots of folks went with MySQL early because of those factors. They also then tended to write all their PHP, etc, applications to only talk to MySQL, thus making folks who might have preferred PostgreSQL use MySQL to run the app that they needed to run. Once that happens you are kind of in a Catch-22 place. Folks won't write the apps for PostgreSQL until it's used by a larger chunk of the market, but it won't take that large chunk because all the 'cool' apps were written MySQL only, so they have to run MySQL instead of PostgreSQL
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> easy to use database for those who don't need a whole lot.
> Oracle supplies an enterprise level database that MySQL doesn't aspire to.
> PostgreSQL doesn't know where to fit in.
This is an oversimplification. Each vendor sees itself in all markets:
- oracle/db2/sql server have free versions for tiny apps and very expensive versions for massive apps
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Would I use it to handle a massively-multiplayer game, or a financial institution? No. Does it fit in for a lot of other projects. Yep.
- SEAL
I love this (Score:3, Funny)
Now that there is a respectable benchmark showing postgresql to be faster, performance is suddenly not the issue.
Yep. It's right up there with mysql developers claiming that transa
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What is exactly easier in MySql?
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Has anyone used the PostgreSQL open source to refactor the DB to support just a subset of SQL and features (the most popular stuff that eg. "LAMP" uses), then benchmarked it vs the default distro, to show higher performance?
I don't see how stripping out nused features would lead to a big increase in performance. Unused code just sits there in the RAM and does nothing to slow you down (_IF_ the application is well-designed)
For that matter, has anyone merged any open source Java server container with PostgreSQL for higher performance of that use case, in an integrated architecture without network and other overhead for messages, and more atomic transactions?
Again, i think this would not increase the performance by a notable amount. The bottleneck nowadays lies in I/O; the two copy-commands needed to pipe something through the tcp/ip-stack are negligable.
Version 8.1 :-) (Score:3, Interesting)
http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.2/static/routine
You can tune it as to when to do such operations, or what max percent of normal I/O can be used for those tasks.
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