Re: why postgresql over other RDBMS

For us?

Stability. Pure and simple. It ended up that the site was faster too.
One issue with postgresql is that connection time is slower than
mysql. Otherwise most everything else is just as fast or faster.

So with Ruby on Rails, there is a persistent connections from the
container, and that disadvantage dissapears. If there's anything slow
in the site, its ruby template rendering, database access generally is
10% or less of total time it takes to generate our most popular pages.

Ericson Smith
Developer
http://www.funadvice.com


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> On 05/24/07 10:30, Alexander Staubo wrote:
> > On 5/24/07, Richard Huxton <dev@archonet.com> wrote:
> >> Tom Allison wrote:
> >> > You've addressed cost and performance.
> >> > Not much left.
> >> >
> >> > Try it out for yourself and see if it works for you.
> >>
> >> + elephant in logo
> >> - unpronounceable name
> >> + excellent mailing lists
> >> + excellent developer community
> >> - you can download as many copies as you like and a salesman still won't
> >> take you out to lunch
> >
> > + Friendly toolset in the box. [1]
> > + Transactional DDL. [2]
> > + Table inheritance, if you care to use unportable features.
> > + Extensibility. [3]
> > + PostGIS for spatial extensions.
> > - Replication offerings suck.
> > - Warm standby involve a lot of manual labour.
> > - Point-in-time recovery involve a lot of manual labour.
> >
> > [1] psql+readline, pg_dump etc. are a breeze compared to crusty Oracle
> > tools; psql feels distinctly modern compared to MySQL's crummy
> > interpreter.
> >
> > [2] Nobody else has this, I believe, except possibly Ingres and
> > NonStop SQL. This means you can do a "begin transaction", then issue
> > "create table", "alter table", etc. ad nauseum, and in the mean time
> > concurrent transactions will just work. Beautiful for atomically
> > upgrading a production server. Oracle, of course, commits after each
> > DDL statements.
>
> Rdb/VMS and CODASYL DBMS (both Oracle, formerly DEC, products) also
> have transactional DDL.  Actually, I was quite stunned to discover
> that Oracle doesn't do that.
>
> Interbase/Firebird probably also has transactional DDL.
>
> > [3] PostgreSQL can be extended with new domain types, stored-procedure
> > languages (eg., PL/Python, PL/Perl), functions (eg., dblink,
> > fuzzystrmatch, cube), and indexes (GiST, GIN). Together this allows
> > projects such as TSearch2 and PostGIS to be implemented as separate
> > extensions to PostgreSQL.
>
> - --
> Ron Johnson, Jr.
> Jefferson LA  USA
>
> Give a man a fish, and he eats for a day.
> Hit him with a fish, and he goes away for good!
>
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