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0 pointsmanigandham9y ago0 comments

> Postgres, but that anyone uses Microsoft or Oracle at all. Not only do they cost a lot, but from a purely technical standpoint they are worse.

Based on what? Both commercial databases have incredible features, tooling and extensions that leave postgres behind. Postgres today doesn't even have a solid scale-up or scale-out strategy.

It does have nice SQL support and makes developer lives a little easier but this isnt anywhere close to making it the absolute winner technically.

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e12e9y ago

I'm curious what you mean by Postgres not having a "scale-up" strategy. Are you saying that eg MS SQL works better with a few TBs of ram and 128 cores than Postgres does?

manigandhamOP9y ago

Yes. Postgres famously has been single-threaded for queries for a long time. The upcoming version 9.6 is finally introducing some basic parallel scan/join/aggregate functionality.

MS SQL, Oracle and pretty much all the commercial databases are much farther along in scaling up and making the most of a single machine.

jeltz9y ago

The very article you are commenting on is about scaling up with PostgreSQL. PostgreSQL is excellent at scaling up with many small queries, but has problems with few large ones.

manigandhamOP9y ago

This is a brand new commit, it's not today. There's been some good progress recently but Postgres historically hasn't been the best at scaling up, especially compared to the commercial engines.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse

0 pointsmanigandham9y ago0 comments

> Postgres, but that anyone uses Microsoft or Oracle at all. Not only do they cost a lot, but from a purely technical standpoint they are worse.

Based on what? Both commercial databases have incredible features, tooling and extensions that leave postgres behind. Postgres today doesn't even have a solid scale-up or scale-out strategy.

It does have nice SQL support and makes developer lives a little easier but this isnt anywhere close to making it the absolute winner technically.

0 comments

e12e9y ago

I'm curious what you mean by Postgres not having a "scale-up" strategy. Are you saying that eg MS SQL works better with a few TBs of ram and 128 cores than Postgres does?

manigandhamOP9y ago

Yes. Postgres famously has been single-threaded for queries for a long time. The upcoming version 9.6 is finally introducing some basic parallel scan/join/aggregate functionality.

MS SQL, Oracle and pretty much all the commercial databases are much farther along in scaling up and making the most of a single machine.

jeltz9y ago

The very article you are commenting on is about scaling up with PostgreSQL. PostgreSQL is excellent at scaling up with many small queries, but has problems with few large ones.

manigandhamOP9y ago

This is a brand new commit, it's not today. There's been some good progress recently but Postgres historically hasn't been the best at scaling up, especially compared to the commercial engines.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse