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PostgreSQL on Big Sites?
An anonymous reader asks: "I've been using PostgreSQL for years on small projects, and I have an opportunity to migrate my company's websites from Oracle to an open-source alternative. It would be good to be able to show the PHBs that PostgreSQL is a viable candidate, but I'm unable to find a list of high-traffic sites that use it. Does anyone know of any popular sites that run PostgreSQL?"
See, for instance, PostgreSQL Case Studies and from the pgsql-advocacy mailing list comes some more: Finally, a list of *big* companies using PostgreSQL for *serious* projects. Why use PostgreSQL? Here's why for some examples.
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MadPenguin has an interview with Josh Berkus, one of the core team members of PostgreSQL.
Is your companies website essentially read-only page loading? If so, why not just go with MySQL. Do you really need MVCC in a read-only scenario?
On the other hand, If your company is doing transaction processing, like a customer facing product ordering system (think amazon), its a lot more than just having to sustain certain volumes. The reputation of your company and its ability to make money by selling products will rely entirely on your database. In a best case scenario there may be no difference between oracle and postgres. But imagine the worst case scenario. Peak volume, company is making $1M/hour in sales on the web, db dies and won't come up....who you gonna call?
There's more to the equation than up front cost and ability to handle volumes....
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SPI, the authoritative .org registrar, and Afilias, the authoritative .info registrar both use PostgreSQL for their registration databases.
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Their website shows that BASF uses PostgreSQL as their DB.
www.basf.com
They're an enormous company. I've always heard too that PostgreSQL is much better for larger sites. Cannot say for sure though as I have never used it.
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There's no reason however to write all your SPs in PLSQL. Oracle supports stored procedures in Java, as does Postgres.
This not only makes it easier in some instances to migrate some applications to PGSQL, it also improves performance (JIT compiling). You don't say exactly where the performance bottlenecks are, but this could improve performance and close the gap between PGSQL and Oracle.
That said, if you've been working for years on tuning your Oracle physical design to a fare-thee-well, it's going to be nearly impossible to beat, supposing the transaction volume and query performance are the chief issues.
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Apple's remote desktop 2 package uses PostgreSQL for its data store.
link
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OpenACS has been Postgres-based for a long time, as a free alternative to Oracle. You can get plenty of Postgres information at www.openacs.org The folks there have been using it for years for all kinds of sites, so it's pretty well tested. OpenACS is a unique system using AOLServer and TCL, but the database performance should translate to whatever server/scripting platform you're using.
...on some hefty hardware these days. This post talks about running it on a 16 CPU machine...
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We are an e-Learning company which started 4 years back with very little startup budget. We have been using Postgres for 4 years now and it has never let us down. We never imagined our company would grow so big so fast. Today we provide an ASP solution for over 10,000 users from around 20 companies. Postgres scales very well and is quite responsive. In the past we have had periods of 100% CPU utilization but postgres did not crash on us. You have to know how to configure it correctly and is will perform as well as a commercial DB.