On Fri, 2003-06-06 at 15:03, Erik Price wrote: > * I have just started playing with Postgres (I used to use MySQL > exclusively) and I must say it is a really nice database, from the > application developer perspective.
I agree that it has some great features, but when we looked into using it, we found some serious drawbacks to it. If anybody has comments on these, I'd be very interested to hear them. 1) Indexes require casting. If you have a field (let's call it 'id') that is a bigint, and you add an index to it, you have to cast your number to a bigint or the index will not be used. For example, with mysql, I would do: select * from tablename where id = 1; However, in postgres, this will not make use of the index. To use the index, I need to do: select * from tablename where id = 1::bigint; This is a bit of a pain in the buttocks. 8) 2) Inconsistent performance. We have a database with a normalized table of first names, as well as a normalized table of last names. Each table has > 50,000 rows in it. We used the sample fuzzy search module that comes with the debian package to do some tests and the behavior was pretty wildly inconsistent. Some times a query would take 5 seconds, sometimes it would take 30. On the same machine. Initially we figured that the first shot at the query would be slower, as there was no cached data. However, sometimes the 5 second response would be immediately after starting postgres, while the 30 second response would be performed right after... 3) Messy permission configuration. We've gotten to used to mysql's "mysql" database for controlling access. It's very nice, and as of yet, postgres doesn't have anything comparable. 4) Database dumps. The database dump tool that came with postgres appeared to be plain 'ole broken. It would crap out in the middle of a dump. If it didn't crap out, the dump file would often contain syntax errors. All of this being said, I have to say that postgres definitely impressed me with a few things. The range of features was pretty nice. Everything from stored procedures in multiple languages (including my personal favorite - python), views, triggers, real cursors (from a programming standpoint), and so on. For our purposes, it seemed to need a bit of maturation, but it seems like it has some serious potential. -- "Maybe I'll be able to get a job when I graduate..." -Linus Torvalds Cole Tuininga Lead Developer Code Energy, Inc [EMAIL PROTECTED] PGP Key ID: 0x43E5755D _______________________________________________ gnhlug-discuss mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss