Re: Optimzing Postgresql

On May 24, 2008, at 11:57 AM, Ram Ravichandran wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I am deciding between MySQL and Postgres. I'm leaning towards
> Postgres mainly due the widely publicized speed when using
> transactions. However, I am not able to find any good books /
> resources for tuning/ optimizing the database. Is there a book like
> "High Performance MySQL" for Postgres that teaches what the
> different parameters are and how to tune them?

The postgresql manual is good.

http://www.westnet.com/~gsmith/content/postgresql/pg-5minute.htm is a
five minute tuning overview.

http://www.powerpostgresql.com/PerfList/ is a good overview of basic
tuning, written for 8.0 but still pretty applicable.

Hang out on the pgsql-performance mailing list and see what other
people do - "How do I tune a database for X" comes up pretty
regularly, and gets good answers, so trolling through the mailing list
archive can give some very good advice.

>
> Or do most techniques covered in the High Performance Mysql apply to
> Postgres too?

Probably not. Mysql has a very different philosophy to postgresql. And
some approaches that are suggested to work around performance issue on
mysql may actually harm performance on other databases.

Cheers,
   Steve