If you want to tune your database to squeeze every single Mhz and MB on your machine then indeed you need to take the time to learn the parameters that PostgreS

If you want to tune your database to squeeze every single Mhz and MB on your machine then indeed you need to take the time to learn the parameters that PostgreSQL offers you, and it does offer you those parameters, it's an extra compared to MySQL. But you don't have to, you can pretty much limit yourself to a few configuration parameters that are very useful and would get you 80% of the way, and of course add some monitoring, especially for slow queries. A good starting point for setting up a database is here: http://www.commandprompt.com/blogs/joshua_drake/2010/03/5_steps_to_postgresql_performance/ http://www.commandprompt.com/blogs/joshua_drake/2010/03/5_st...