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PostgreSQL 9.2 Out with Greatly Improved Scalability

Posted by Unknown on from the rev-your-engines dept.

The PostgreSQL project announced the release of PostgreSQL 9.2 today. The headliner: "With the addition of linear scalability to 64 cores, index-only scans and reductions in CPU power consumption, PostgreSQL 9.2 has significantly improved scalability and developer flexibility for the most demanding workloads. ... Up to 350,000 read queries per second (more than 4X faster) ... Index-only scans for data warehousing queries (2–20X faster) ... Up to 14,000 data writes per second (5X faster)" Additionally, there's now a JSON type (including the ability to retrieve row results in JSON directly from the database) ala the XML type (although lacking a broad set of utility functions). Minor, but probably a welcome relief to those who need them, 9.2 adds range restricted types. For the gory details, see the what's new page, or the full release notes.

3 of 146 comments (clear)

  1. Re:That's great and all, but . . . by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    9.3. Seriously.

    http://rhaas.blogspot.com/2012/06/absurd-shared-memory-limits.html

  2. Re:That's great and all, but . . . by dragonk · · Score: 5, Informative

    I just posted this to the blog, but I will repeat it here --

    There is a very good reason we OS vendors do not ship with SysV default limits high enough to run a serious PostgreSQL database. There is very little software that uses SysV in any serious way other than PostgreSQL and there is a fixed overhead to increasing those limits. You end up wasting RAM for all the users who do not need the limits to be that high. That said, you are late to the party here, vendors have finally decided that the fixed overheads are low enough relative to modern RAM sizes that the defaults can be raised quite high, DragonFly BSD has shipped with greatly increased limits for a year or so and I believe FreeBSD also.

    There is a serious problem with this patch on BSD kernels. All of the BSD sysv implementations have a shm_use_phys optimization which forces the kernel to wire up memory pages used to back SysV segments. This increases performance by not requiring the allocation of pv entries for these pages and also reduces memory pressure. Most serious users of PostgreSQL on BSD platforms use this well-documented optimization. After switching to 9.3, large and well optimized Pg installations that previously ran well in memory will be forced into swap because of the pv entry overhead.

  3. Re:How PostgreSQL stacks up to Oracle ? by rycamor · · Score: 5, Informative

    Generally there is very little in the sense of logical data manipulation capabilities in which Oracle exceeds PostgreSQL (usually the opposite, actually). The main advantage Oracle has is in the extreme high end of scalability and replication, and that benefit is offset by massive complexity in setup and configuration. Even there, PostgreSQL is closing fast these days, with built-in streaming replication, table partitioning, and all sorts of high-end goodies.

    I do all sorts of PostgreSQL consulting, and you would be surprised at the number of large companies and government organizations considering migration from Oracle to PostgreSQL.

    And if you *really* need PostgreSQL to go into high gear, just pay for the commercial Postgres Plus Advanced Server from EnterpriseDB and you will get a few heavy-duty add-ons, including an Oracle compatiblity layer.

    Also, IMHO one of the really cool things about PostgreSQL is the number of very geeky tools it puts at your disposal, such as a rich library of datatypes and additional features, along with the ability to create your own user-defined datatypes.