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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?"
Assuming the relational database is storing relational data, its hard to imagine a 2G database needed to store read only pages. Of course, some people store pdf's, word docs, etc into relational db's as clobs. This is a complete waste of resources. I would use MySQL in a read-only scenario where transactions are unneeded.
I am also assuming that the guy who is posing this question IS the DBA. At least I sure hope so, for whoever is the DBA's sake. Your scenario is a best case recovery scenario using point-in-time recovery. What if its the point-in-time recovery that is broken/buggy? As a DBA, who do you want to deal with? Who are you gonna call?
mp3's are only for those with bad memories
My company uses PostgreSQL and are pretty happy with the performance. The only problem we had was in November when the Google spider went crazy and hit us a few million times a day for a few weeks. After a few hours of optimization, the sites were running smooth. A few years ago we had to come up with a db platform and we were a small company. We could use oracle but it's all around expensive. Oracle software, support, licensing, and engineers are expensive. Mysql's transaction support was too bleeding edge at the time. What I like most about postgresql is the transition from oracle to postgresql is smooth and most our engineers come from an oracle environment. Plus postgresql has adequate transactions support, subselects and functions...and it's free.
(In defense of Google, their spider did not intentionally go crazy - we have distributed webservers on seperate IPs so the spider can't tell if it's pounding one particular site. However Google only spidered more pages as a publicity stunt before MSN search was released so maybe they are to blame...)
That wasn't my point. My point was that given the current information his question cannot be answered. I then gave two examples. If his company wants a database for a scenario that is a read-only webpage scenario, it doesn't really matter if you use an open source db or a commercial one. Whatever works best and cheapest.
On the other hand, if his companies business is reliant on this database for its core revenue generation then this is a business decision and not a technical one. Cost is only a minor factor in this decision. And actually, open source vs. commercial is a minor factor as well. If postgres offers equivalent uptime, equivalent performance, equivalent service, equivalent ability to hire skilled resources worldwide, etc then it should be a no-brainer.
mp3's are only for those with bad memories
Not that imaginative, are you.
A geospatial database that holds merely lat/long & address info (street names, city&state codes, zips, address ranges) and related tables containing information about demographics, etc can easily get into the 90GB range. One I used for analyzing targeted marketing campaigns was about 270GB.