4 ms·

I would emphasise the point made about Postgres read performance. If all you are doing is reading single rows from a single table using an index, then yes Postg

I would emphasise the point made about Postgres read performance. If all you are doing is reading single rows from a single table using an index, then yes Postgres is overkill and other solutions may perform better. However, the overhead that Postgres has is due to a remarkably effective query planner, which can be a godsend if you have a complex multi-table join. A few years ago I was working on a project with a large Postgres database that regularly did queries joining 20 tables together, which Postgres was quite happy to accommodate. Also, that overhead can be suffered only once for many similar queries if you make use of prepared statements, which can bring the performance of simple read queries up. Also, bulk writes can be sped up through the COPY IN BINARY interface - we were getting bulk load speeds basically limited by the write speed of our RAID array. In short, I have been very impressed indeed with Postgres. They do it right.

ajtaylor 13y ago
> They do it right. This is the hallmark of Postgres. Either they do it right or they don't do it at all. For a long time, this worked against them in benchmarks because doing it right meant that mysql was faster (due to cutting corners). It pleases me to no end to see the progress the 9.x series has been making regards to performance, ease of replication setup and marketing.
copergi 13y ago
>If all you are doing is reading single rows from a single table using an index, then yes Postgres is overkill and other solutions may perform better No, not really. Mysql will perform very slightly better if you are doing just simple selects and they are all with a single connection. But it is a pretty small difference, and it goes away if you have anything else happening at all. This notion that postgresql is somehow "overkill" because it isn't broken is silly.
- estebank 13y ago
  It is overkill if SQLite is enough. I see no reason to use MySQL, but some companies have spent an awful lot of time customizing it to their needs. I do believe that effort would have given more bang for the buck in PostgreSQL.
lewaldman 13y ago
>If all you are doing is reading single rows from a single table using an index, then yes Postgres is overkill and other solutions may perform better Honest question... Why someone with this usage would use a RDBMS? Would be a poor choice IMHO.

ajtaylor 13y ago

> They do it right. This is the hallmark of Postgres. Either they do it right or they don't do it at all. For a long time, this worked against them in benchmarks because doing it right meant that mysql was faster (due to cutting corners). It pleases me to no end to see the progress the 9.x series has been making regards to performance, ease of replication setup and marketing.

copergi 13y ago

>If all you are doing is reading single rows from a single table using an index, then yes Postgres is overkill and other solutions may perform better No, not really. Mysql will perform very slightly better if you are doing just simple selects and they are all with a single connection. But it is a pretty small difference, and it goes away if you have anything else happening at all. This notion that postgresql is somehow "overkill" because it isn't broken is silly.

estebank 13y ago
It is overkill if SQLite is enough. I see no reason to use MySQL, but some companies have spent an awful lot of time customizing it to their needs. I do believe that effort would have given more bang for the buck in PostgreSQL.

lewaldman 13y ago

>If all you are doing is reading single rows from a single table using an index, then yes Postgres is overkill and other solutions may perform better Honest question... Why someone with this usage would use a RDBMS? Would be a poor choice IMHO.