Interesting Slashdot article that attracted a lot of comments about pg

Hi,

I think the article and comments may be of interest to pg developer, and
other pg users.

Mostly the pg comments are positive and well informed.

I have added a couple of comments myself about pg.

I would be interested in the developers' comments about the XID problem
(not that it is likely to affect my usage of pg!).

http://developers.slashdot.org/story/11/07/09/1256241/Facebook-Trapped-In-MySQL-a-Fate-Worse-Than-Death
[...]
Re:Oracle vs Facebook?
by evilviper (135110) Alter Relationship on 2011-07-10 14:06 (#36708666)
Journal

I agree that Postgres is vastly superior to MySQL and competitive with
enterprise-class databases. We're using Postgres for databases in excess
of a terabyte ourselves, for large-scale production purposes, so I know
it works... HOWEVER, I think the XID issue is significant, not getting
any developer attention, and is something you're just about guaranteed
to run-into with terabyte databases.

You see, even if you run Postgres on a 64-bit platform, you're limited
to XIDs of 2^31, or 2 billion rows. Now, to prevent this causing a
problem, Postgres' VACUUM process will start running when you get close
to 1 billion, killing your performance. Of course there are a dozen
possible ways to workaround this, but none are trivial or work perfectly
and consistently. This is postgres' biggest scalability limitation,
ahead of even the imperfect replication options available.
[...]