Re: Datatypes and performance

On Fri, Jul 04, 2003 at 10:50:17PM -0700, Maksim Likharev wrote:
> Wasn't any sarcasm in my words,

Well, I had really thought so.  I'm no native english speaker so I
frequently misunderstand people.

> but I have benchmarks and my observations about performance in general.
> Just want to say, I haven't seen much other DBMS systems other then
> Microsoft SQL, and Postgres 7.3.x, so my performance observations
> based on those systems.  Selects, do not have any problems in general
> equal or slightly slower that MS SQL.

> Inserts/Updates sometimes slow, sometimes a nightmare,
> in general painfully slow.

This is probably unrelated to the technique I was describing (it's
called TOAST, by the way).  Try using another approach, for example if
you have lots of inserts, wrap them in a transaction like
BEGIN
INSERT ...
INSERT ...
...
COMMIT

Or use a COPY statement.  Both of those approaches are much faster than
using hundreds of standalone inserts.

Be sure to tune your server, for example bump up the shared_buffers
setting, VACUUM frequently, ANALYZE when there's significant statistical
change in your data, etc.  There are lots of documents on how to do
this (I'm sure somebody will post appropiate URLs for those).

--
Alvaro Herrera (<alvherre[a]dcc.uchile.cl>)
"Por suerte hoy explotó el califont porque si no me habría muerto
de aburrido"  (Papelucho)