Re: Choice of DB

In my experience with high volume ecommerce and location tracking systems is that PostgreSQL performed more than adequately. Especially given that I trust PostgreSQL and I _do not_ trust MySQL/MariaDB at all to have any data integrity, even the most recent versions.

I've had databases sized into the 100s of GB run perfectly well, but those are relatively small. I've heard reports from larger installations that PostgreSQL keeps chugging.

Additionally, the additional features of PostgreSQL over MySQL/MariaDB are really night and day and much more complete and useful, such as window functions, check constraints, json datatype, triggers, transition tables, plpgsql, proper transactions, expression indecies, better explain output, ranged types and indecies, richer datatypes, GIN/GIST searches, sane decisions in terms of type handing and automatic casting, as well as all of the extensions available including my favourites: PostGIS and pg-routing.

Every time I have to use MySQL, I end up wishing I had the power of PostgreSQL, because I either have to be painful and inefficient, or I have to accept a lesser end-product. (I literally don't have any nice things to say about MySQL or MariaDB other than "it doesn't always break". I've been burned many times by it.)

Moreover, between recent features such as partitioning updates and logical replication, scaling horizontally is becoming easier and easier.

Also, Amazon is in the process of moving all of their Oracle-based ERP systems to PostgreSQL (via their Aurora product). Despite one news story based on a journalist's misunderstanding, the transition appears to be going well, but they're not rushing it, so they won't be off until 2020. (That was the last date I've heard.)

The "scary" uber story boils down to two things, from my outsider understanding:

1) They had a lot of long-running, dependent transactions due to poor coding, which obviously led to poor performance, and would do so with any database system.

2) They don't really "use" MySQL in any RDBMS sense; they basically use it as a Key-Value store for some new database they've written that's similar to Google's BigTable in terms of access styles.

I wouldn't worry about Ubers missteps and problems.

Jim

On Tue, Nov 27, 2018 at 4:08 PM Nico Callewaert <app.development1972@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi,

It's my first post to this list. I'm a little familiar with PostgreSQL from the documentation but never used it yet in a real environment. I've used the last 15 years Firebird as the RDBMS for our ERP application. Not bad, it served us somehow ok, but not that great either... I've grown unhappy with the product because of the many corrupted database we encounter at customer sites. I have plans to rewrite the ERP application and use a new RDBMS and create a new database from scratch. And of course the problem now is, what RDBMS to use. I know this is not an easy question and has no straight answer. And I certainly don't want to start a war of words of pro's and con's of database servers. However I have to make a choice.

First of all the Uber story scared me. Seems they went from Postgres to MySql because of several issues. But maybe issues I would never run into. First of all, performance is certainly very important. It's said that MariaDB outperforms "everything", but I'm not sure if that's a good choice. It's not like we have a thousand simultanous users who are updating records non stop. Most of our sites have between 10 and 50 users. Of course they insert and update data, but not at a speed of xxx transactions per second. They are simply users who enter quotes, orders, delivery notes, invoices, projects, time registration of employees on the road, etc....

I'm wondering if PostgreSQL outperforms Firebird in client/server ERP applications? The big thing is, sometimes large datasets are fetched, I'm wondering if PostgreSQL would do better than firebird and if the performance of Postgres is fine let's say compared to mysql or mariadb, because if the performance won't be good, my boss would consider the migration from firebird a total failure.

Thanks in advance and sorry if my question doesn't fit in with the list.

Best regards...