On Tue, 10 Jun 2003, Karien wrote:
> Hi there.
>
> First things first. I just want to say I've moved from Mysql to Postgres
> for alot of reasons. :-)
>
> My questions:
> =============
>
> * What is the limit my PostgresDB can grow to? 4gigs, 8gigs?
Waaayy bigger. While the theoretical limit is truly huge, in real life,
there are examples of databases of hundreds of terabytes running
underneath postgresql.
> * What sort of system I'am a looking at running postgres on?
From a 486-50 with 16 Meg of ram to a 64 way Sun E10k with 64 gigs of RAM,
or a Z990 mainframe with 32 CPUs. And anything in between.
> Now here's a really confusing one :-)
>
> * Can just can't decide which OS to use here:
>
> FreeBSD or Linux
>
> Which OS would you guys chose?
I would choose Linux because I know it well, and I know its pitfalls and
how to avoid them. Look at your "local support" i.e. the other computer
folks you interact with. If there's lots of expertise in BSD around you,
then pick that. Note that Postgresql also runs on
Solaris
HPUX
AIX
Mac OSX
SCO Openserver
SunOS4
Tru64
Unixware
Windows
So if you need to migrate to big iron, you can.
> Last question
> ==============
>
> * Where can I find some real good tests done on Postgres which will
> indicate:
>
> - How fast Postgres really works
> - Postgres and other DB compared
> - Database UPTIME
> - Speed and complexity of DB
http://sourceforge.net/projects/osdb/
is considered one of the better benchmarks out there.
My personal experience, in running Postgresql for four years has been zero
unscheduled down time, and zero data loss. And it's quite fast as long
as you know not to do certain things (i.e. select max(id) from
tableofabillionrows).
The last version of Postgresql I was able to bring down with a bad query
(think unconstrained joins on several million row tables) was 6.5.3.
My advice is to thouroughly test your server before putting it online.
just because the vendor told you all the memory was good doesn't mean it
is.
see www.memtest86.com for a good memory tester.