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PostgreSQL 8.2 Released
An anonymous reader writes to let us know that PostgreSQL 8.2 has been released (bits, release notes). 8.2 is positioned as a performance release. PostgreSQL it is still missing the SQL:2003 Window Functions that are critical in business reporting, so Oracle and DB2 will still win out for OLAP/data warehouse applications.
MySQL has been the dominant SQL server within the open source community. Between its non-standard SQL and it's lack of advanced features, many developers and DBAs are getting fed up. Thankfully, they've been able to turn to PostgreSQL.
At my firm, we switched some of our MySQL Enterprise databases over to PostgreSQL 8.1. What we found was pretty amazing: PostgreSQL outperformed MySQL by approximately 23% in terms of the number of queries it could handle per second. And this was with a very basic level of tuning! Our MySQL installations, on the other hand, had been tuned by three different consultants. Keep in mind that both were running on exactly the same system, under the same installation of FreeBSD. Were not sure exactly why there was such a remarkable increase in performance when using PostgreSQL, even without much tuning, but we're happy with it nonetheless. We're also happy to no longer being paying MySQL for support.
We're actually quite happy to get away from MySQL. The other developers I work with were quite sickened by the deal MySQL AB reached with SCO a while back. While we're strictly a BSD shop, we still think SCO's actions are quite distasteful, and we are willing to move away from companies that enter into deals with them.
According to the MySQL fanbois, Window Functions are bad for performance and not even useful. Just like subselects, data integrity, triggers, and transactions. Oh wait, MySQL 5 supports subselects. Subselects are no longer bad for performance.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Bitmap indexes will almost definitely be in 8.3. Gavin Sherry submitted a revised patch for them a few days ago.
How fast is it against MyISAM? (MySQL's main selling point for a lot of people)
PostgreSQL it is still missing the SQL:2003 Window Functions that are critical in business reporting, so Oracle and DB2 will still win out for OLAP/data warehouse applications.
Bullshit, pure and simple. This is nothing more than marketing-speak and you should be ashamed.
I'm not saying that SQL-2003 Window Functions are useless, I'm saying your statement about them being "critical" in business reporting is bullshit. Did no one do business reporting before this standard came out? What the hell did people do in 2002? Are all those MS-SQL Server 2000 and Oracle 8i servers going to fall down in shame? I think not.
I see these comments all the time, usually in marketing brochures from a software vendor touting a new feature. They make it sound like all other products are steaming piles of shit if they don't have whiz-bang-feature #16. They like avoiding any conversation that goes "But, I've been using your product and it works great. Are you telling me your product (last rev) is a steaming pile of shit? That implies if I upgrade, next year you're going to be telling me how THIS rev you are so loudly praising is also a steaming pile of shit."
Charles (had enough marketing-speak for this year)
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
... I'm also doubting the 23% increase in performance... FWIW, and YMMV, when you get hammered with many concurrent queries, it's much, much faster. At about 100 concurrent hits, about 50% faster: http://tweakers.net/reviews/657/6 Benchmark method here: http://tweakers.net/reviews/646/9Yes, it's missing description on how exactly they set up MySQL. MyISAM? innodb? So take it with a grain of salt.
What do PostgreSQL users do for replication? I'm a MySQL admin who would really like to be able to switch to PostgreSQL, but we need to be able to have several slaves hanging off a master, and have everything replicated in as real-time as possible (but asynchronously) to the slaves. I have spent some time looking for how to do this in PostgreSQL but have found each solution lacking. The "most popular free" one, according to the PostgreSQL faq, is "Slony-I", but from what I could find it doesn't replicate schema changes to the slaves. What happens to your replication when the slaves sees an update to a column/table that doesn't exist on the slave? Slony also doesn't replicate "large objects"; I don't know what they are, but as a MySQL admin who has been replicating our databases for many years, I have a hard time imagining adjusting to limitations like these.
Most of the other options I found were abandonware, undocumented, didn't work with PostgreSQL 8.x, etc. I looked at commercial solutions, but they were similarly a mess. Specifically, here is my survey:
* pgpool -- Max 2 servers, and they're not really in sync---commands like now() or rand() will be executed independently on the mirrored machines, causing them to have different data.
* Slony I -- DB schema changes not replicated, nor are "large objects"
* PGCluster -- Synchronous multi-master. We don't want synchronous, and don't need multi-master. Documentation patchy, didn't appear to be currently maintained.
* CommandPrompt "Mammoth" -- Documentation "in the works". PostgreSQL 8.0.7. Tables can't use "inheritance". Schema changes not replicated (at least not table creation, not sure about the rest). Only 1 db replicated, not all dbs. Tables must have primary keys. Have to list tables in config file.
* Bizgres/GreenPlum -- Buzzword-compliant website, but website was broken when I looked for details. The "Community" is inactive---forum is barely used, questions are unanswered.
* PostgrSQL Replicator -- Poorly documented. Only mentions up to 7.x. "News" is from 2001.
I'm not ragging on PostgreSQL: I'd really like to be able to migrate to it. I just fear that when replication is done in a third-party fashion, it loses the tight integration with the dbms necessary to make it work truly seamlessly, and that it isn't maintained as well as the core product.
Perhaps this comment is off-topic, since the post is about a new release of PostgreSQL, not asking for questions about its individual features. But this is the one feature I look for in each new release, and the fact that I couldn't find any good solution makes me wonder if it's because I missed the one great one that people actually use.
> 8.2 is positioned as a performance release.
We've only got a small database (17 million records or so), and PostgreSQL 8.1 has been handling it fine. But I'm still looking forward to seeing how 8.2 improves things.
And we're using it in another production system, too, which is going to get pretty big (I hope). Lively times!
The Army reading list
I worked a lot with Oracle, and then joined an open source project that started using PostgreSQL. The project is a billing system, so is data intensive. What a great little database PostgreSQL is. And that was back in th 7.x version.
Actually, jBilling http://www.jbilling.com/ now runs in many databases but still PostgreSQL is holding its ground against Oracle and other heavyweights. Those extra features that Oracle says you need and charges you an arm and a leg, are really not needed in most applications.
Cheers,
Paul C.
Sr Developer
http://www.jbilling.com/ - The Open Source Enterprise Billing System
Apparently the submitter has not been visited by any of the plethora of reporting tools vendors who will tell you (without you asking) how crappy the built-in stuff is and how great their stuff is.
Also, given the text, isn't Oracle and DB2 also missing those critical SQL:2003 Window Functions?
actually, they used innodb, and yes, Postgres scales much better than MySQL, but MySQL is a little more streamlined for low-volume jobs.
--That's the point of being root, you can do anything you want, even if it's stupid.
... is create a smallint index on an int column ;-)
It sounds like you just don't know how to deal with FreeBSD. That would explain the poor performance you experienced, and how it is completely contrary to what we've found.
For the heavest application at my last job, the load pattern was very query heavy, although the application stored intermediate results in temporary tables. This application is heavily threaded, creating two threads per user connection, plus the MySQL thread, so we're talking like 150 threads created & destroyed per second.
Our original platform was Solaris, and performance was excellent (well, excellent considering the dog-slow CPUs that Sun makes).
We eventually migrated to Linux, but this was possible only after the new thread libraries (well, new at the time). Performance then was quite good.
We found MySQL under FreeBSD basically unusable under heavy loads.
We never tweaked any of the systems. We did try a few thread libraries under FreeBSD, but they all sucked.
... what do PG users use for full text searching?
The same as everybody else who stores text in a relational database. Use external indexing, such as Lucene, which actually has some features you'd want for non-trivial full text indexing and searching, such as stemming.
(From Wikipedia and archived MySQL manuals)
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.