# PostgreSQL **URL:** \ **Category:** Rails\ **Created:** [July 31, 2006, 11:13am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/postgresql/100676 "2006-07-31T11:13:16Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 6\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![flnative](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/f/5daacb/32.png) [@flnative](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/flnative)\ **Post date:** [July 31, 2006, 11:13am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/postgresql/100676/1 "2006-07-31T11:13:16Z")
Hi @ all Does anyone has some experience with PostgreSQL and RoR? Does it gives any disadvantages or problems with PostgreSQL? I have a webapplication, that manage (read/write) many records (no. 200’000 records) and I search a ideal database. Actually, I have two options: - MySQL / - PostgreSQL And now, I would like to ascertain a good solution… Thx, ribit ---
**Author:** ![flnative](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/f/5daacb/32.png) [@flnative](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/flnative)\ **Post date:** [July 31, 2006, 11:45am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/postgresql/100676/2 "2006-07-31T11:45:20Z")
I use postgres for all of my rails apps and I love it. In particular for searching tsearch2 gives you tremendous flexibility - like building indexes on fields from multiple tables and giving you the results based on rank etc… People say it’s slower than mysql, but I’ve never had any noticeable performance problems (with the right indexes and regular vacuuming you can boost postgres’s performance a lot). One of my apps searches a tsearch index of 75,000 records and return the first page of the resultset with 4 joins in under 1 seconds and I know of a few areas where I could improve this more. [www.jefdean.com](http://www.jefdean.com) removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid 917 414 7801 ---
**Author:** ![flnative](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/f/5daacb/32.png) [@flnative](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/flnative)\ **Post date:** [July 31, 2006, 2:07pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/postgresql/100676/3 "2006-07-31T14:07:44Z")
Thomas Muster wrote: > Hi @ all > > Does anyone has some experience with PostgreSQL and RoR? Does it gives > any disadvantages or problems with PostgreSQL? I have a webapplication, > that manage (read/write) many records (no. 200’000 records) and I search > a ideal database. Actually, I have two options: - MySQL / - PostgreSQL > And now, I would like to ascertain a good solution… > > Thx, ribit I’ve shipped several commercial Rails apps on top of Postgres. It’s perfectly fine. Keep an eye on the size of the data files and make sure you run VACUUM at least once a day (more often if you do a lot of UPDATEs or DELETEs). I geenrally prefer Postgres for OLTP apps and MySQL for OLAP. In your case, the data size is so small you probably won’t notice a difference. ---
**Author:** ![flnative](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/f/5daacb/32.png) [@flnative](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/flnative)\ **Post date:** [July 31, 2006, 2:43pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/postgresql/100676/4 "2006-07-31T14:43:44Z")
> I’ve shipped several commercial Rails apps on top of Postgres. It’s > perfectly fine. Keep an eye on the size of the data files and make sure > you run VACUUM at least once a day (more often if you do a lot of > UPDATEs or DELETEs). I geenrally prefer Postgres for OLTP apps and MySQL > for OLAP. In your case, the data size is so small you probably won’t > notice a difference. It’s correct, the data size is small (200’000 records). But an other application is running as a concurrent activity (UPDATE records). So I have many transactions (about 10’000 per day). Do you think, that PostgreSQL is the better solution for me with these transaction? Can I automate the VACUUM because I haven’t time every day to start the VACUUM? ---
**Author:** ![flnative](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/f/5daacb/32.png) [@flnative](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/flnative)\ **Post date:** [July 31, 2006, 3:13pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/postgresql/100676/5 "2006-07-31T15:13:30Z")
> It’s correct, the data size is small (200’000 records). But an other > application is running as a concurrent activity (UPDATE records). So I > have many transactions (about 10’000 per day). Do you think, that > PostgreSQL is the better solution for me with these transaction? Can I > automate the VACUUM because I haven’t time every day to start the > VACUUM? Yeah, the later versions of Postgres ship with autovacuum builtin and enabled, which works well for most applications. Postgres uses an MVCC architecture, which basically means that an update is actually an insert/mark-as-deleted, and a vacuum is needed periodically to clean out all the “dead” rows. You will want to tune the autovacuum settings to make sure that you are cleaning up often enough and that the number of “dead” rows doesn’t get too large. In general (don’t want to start a flame war), but MySQL tends to be faster for the simple queries with few connections, while Postgres tends to do better with complicated joins and many connections. FWIW, I love Postgres and have had nothing but ease building apps on top of it. ---
**Author:** ![flnative](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/f/5daacb/32.png) [@flnative](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/flnative)\ **Post date:** [July 31, 2006, 3:45pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/postgresql/100676/6 "2006-07-31T15:45:36Z")
Marco R. wrote: > > I’ve shipped several commercial Rails apps on top of Postgres. It’s > > perfectly fine. Keep an eye on the size of the data files and make sure > > you run VACUUM at least once a day (more often if you do a lot of > > UPDATEs or DELETEs). I geenrally prefer Postgres for OLTP apps and MySQL > > for OLAP. In your case, the data size is so small you probably won’t > > notice a difference. > > It’s correct, the data size is small (200’000 records). But an other > application is running as a concurrent activity (UPDATE records). So I > have many transactions (about 10’000 per day). Do you think, that > PostgreSQL is the better solution for me with these transaction? Can I > automate the VACUUM because I haven’t time every day to start the > VACUUM? 10,000 transactions a day is a pretty light load. You can invoke VACUUM from a nightly cron job and you’ll be fine. As I suggested, just watch the disk consumption of your Postgres data files. Proper vacuuming will keep it in bounds. I find that MySQL performance is fine when queries dominate the workload. If you are doing a lot of INSERTs and UPDATEs, especially with tables that have a lot of indexes, I would prefer Postgres.