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New PostgreSQL Guns For NoSQL Market

Posted by samzenpus on from the coming-for-you dept.

angry tapir (1463043) writes "Embracing the widely used JSON data-exchange format, the new version of the PostgreSQL open-source database takes aim at the growing NoSQL market of nonrelational data stores, notably the popular MongoDB. The first beta version of PostgreSQL 9.4, released Thursday, includes a number of new features that address the rapidly growing market for Web applications, many of which require fast storage and retrieval of large amounts of user data."

1 of 162 comments (clear)

  1. Re:If this is anything like MariaDB by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    I am actually *using* this thing. Implemented a database with ~100K XML records, access them by arbitrary XPATh expression.

    Of course "normal" access is slow, but once I agree with the customer on an access pattern, I can set up a functional index. Then we are at a couple millisecs per access (on very low-end hardware). And with GIN indexes, I can even set up things like "find all records where tag A or tag B or tag C equal one of "foo" or "bar". All for a handful millisecs. No database tuning whatsoever -- plain vanilla PostgreSQL 9.1 as it comes to us with Debian.

    Of course you can't compare it with -- say -- Elastic Search, but as soon as I finish uttering "Java" my box is out of memory :-)

    OK, on a more serious note: the usage patterns still are different: if you plan to have 100M biggish records, you'll probably want to throw a lot of boxes at the problem (unless the problem has a very specific structure). Then you'll probably be better off with Elastic Search or some such. OTOH if you want transactions, an SQL database it is. If you need both, you are in a tough place (cf. CAP theorem), so you gotta think hard.

    I don't fucking care whether it's called SQL or noSQL if it's well-done. And PostgreSQL is damn well done. The community rocks too.