Re: Dynamic web sites with PostgreSQL

Nicolay A. Vasiliev wrote:

Hello, Richard, and thanks for your answer!

Best of all, sorry for my poor English cause I am not a native English
speaking man :(.

Your English is fine Nicolay - perfectly fluent AFIACT.

Oh - don't forget to CC: the list too - there are plenty more people who
can help.

we afraid our MySQL won't be able to perform large amount of complex
complicated queries.

Don't be afraid, arm yourself with some facts! MySQL have a lot of
documentation on their website and you can always test the latest
version for free.

Of course - make sure your websites are under an open-source licence
or you are happy paying the licence fee for the business version.

We are using this dbms cause it was installed on our FreeBSD web server
we bought from web hoster.

Ah - well there's your first point of comparison.

There are *lots* of web-hosting companies offering cheap and simple
MySQL+PHP setups.

There are *some* offering PostgreSQL/MS-SQL.

There are hardly any offering anything else.

Of course, if you have a (virtual) server then you can install what you
like. FreeBSD is a popular choice for PostgreSQL, so it's well supported
on that OS.

So we get a question about altenative SQL server.

In fact there are not too much from open source SQL servers, I think
only 2 serious: PostgreSQL and MaxDB. May I sak you about words for
advocacy or accusation for each of these database servers?

Well, you've come to a PostgreSQL list, so I'll give you two guesses
as to which we prefer? :-)

I thought maybe anyone made such comparisons.

It's difficult to do well. What works for one person's setup doesn't for
another. You might find the following useful, but be aware that they
will probably be out of date since both have just released new versions.
http://sql-info.de/mysql/gotchas.html
http://sql-info.de/postgresql/postgres-gotchas.html

In general MySQL is faster for lots of simple select queries. PostgreSQL
tends to scale better as you get more complex queries and concurrent
updates. We also take things like data integrity a lot more seriously
than MySQL AB does/has.

MaxDB has a lot of history, but the opinions I heard about the
code-base when it was first made open-source were not complimentary.
That may of course change, we'll have to see what Mysql AB do with it.

You've also ignored Firebird, which has been around for a long time as
a Borland DB before becoming open-source. Oh, there's also Ingres
recently set free to roam the plains by C.A.

Oh, you're right, this make a sense (I mean Firebird). Maybe we will
consider it as a candidate for migrating. But I've read a PostgreSQL
documentation and I liked the PostgreSQL more than firebird (I worked
with Interbase 5 as Delphi developer). I think PostgreSQL is reacher
than it essentially.

Well, everyone here is happy with it. Your biggest problem may be
un-learning "MySQL habits" you've picked up.

Our tasks: static content generation but using of complicated search
feature on the web site.

You haven't actually provided any information to make a decision. I'm
not sure in what sense you *can* generate static content from a database.

If we have web pages without changings for a long time it's more simple
to make it static basing on database info and regenerate it after this
base info is changed.

It's also not clear what you mean by a "complicated" search.

I meant advanced search with large number of parameters, sorry for this
trouble in formulating.

Well, our planner is quite good - no problem with multi-table joins with
a mix of parameters. It takes into account the frequency of values in a
column too - so if you were doing a name-search on the UK phone-book it
would know that an index would be good for Vasiliev, but for Smith it
might as well scan the whole table.

In short, the only way you'll know which database suits you is to
spend some time and effort testing. No-one here knows what hardware
you will use, operating-system details, filesystem details, database
size, database structure, number of users, number of concurrent
sessions, usage patterns, client language, application framework,
caching requirements, replication requirements, DBA experience, etc.

We use FreeBSD OS, our databases are about 5 Gb. Why I asked the
community - I hoped there is some similar experience and somebody could
help basing on this.

It's well supported on FreeBSD, and 5GB is tiny compared to some
databases discussed here.

--
Richard Huxton
Archonet Ltd

Hello, Richard, and thanks for your answer!

Best of all, sorry for my poor English cause I am not a native English
speaking man :( .

Richard Huxton wrote:

Nicolay A Vasiliev wrote:

Hello there!

I'd like to ask the PostgreSQL community for the conseptual thing.

We develop our web sites using MySQL. We like this for its high speed
and fulltext search feature.

Cool - how much faster than the other systems you tested against was

MySQL?

I meant enough fast for our work. No serious comparison was made, we've
got MySQL because it's more popular using by web-developers.

But nowadays our projects are growing fast and

we afraid our MySQL won't be able to perform large amount of complex

complicated queries.

Don't be afraid, arm yourself with some facts! MySQL have a lot of

documentation on their website and you can always test the latest
version for free.

Of course - make sure your websites are under an open-source licence

or you are happy paying the licence fee for the business version.

We are using this dbms cause it was installed on our FreeBSD web server
we bought from web hoster.

So we get a question about altenative SQL server.

In fact there are not too much from open source SQL servers, I think

only 2 serious: PostgreSQL and MaxDB. May I sak you about words for
advocacy or accusation for each of these database servers?

Well, you've come to a PostgreSQL list, so I'll give you two guesses

as to which we prefer? :-)

I thought maybe anyone made such comparisons.

MaxDB has a lot of history, but the opinions I heard about the

code-base when it was first made open-source were not complimentary.
That may of course change, we'll have to see what Mysql AB do with it.

You've also ignored Firebird, which has been around for a long time

as a Borland DB before becoming open-source. Oh, there's also Ingres
recently set free to roam the plains by C.A.

Oh, you're right, this make a sense (I mean Firebird). Maybe we will
consider it as a candidate for migrating. But I've read a PostgreSQL
documentation and I liked the PostgreSQL more than firebird (I worked
with Interbase 5 as Delphi developer). I think PostgreSQL is reacher
than it essentially.

Our tasks: static content generation but using of complicated search

feature on the web site.

You haven't actually provided any information to make a decision. I'm

not sure in what sense you *can* generate static content from a database.

If we have web pages without changings for a long time it's more simple
to make it static basing on database info and regenerate it after this
base info is changed.

It's also not clear what you mean by a "complicated" search.

I meant advanced search with large number of parameters, sorry for this
trouble in formulating.

In short, the only way you'll know which database suits you is to

spend some time and effort testing. No-one here knows what hardware you
will use, operating-system details, filesystem details, database size,
database structure, number of users, number of concurrent sessions,
usage patterns, client language, application framework, caching
requirements, replication requirements, DBA experience, etc.

We use FreeBSD OS, our databases are about 5 Gb. Why I asked the
community - I hoped there is some similar experience and somebody could
help basing on this.

--
Richard Huxton
Archonet Ltd

Thanks again Richard for your answer!

Nicolay

On Nov 10, 2005, at 2:50 AM, Nicolay A Vasiliev wrote:

I'd like to ask the PostgreSQL community for the conseptual thing.
We develop our web sites using MySQL. We like this for its high
speed and fulltext search feature. But nowadays our projects are
growing fast and we afraid our MySQL won't be able to perform large
amount of complex complicated queries. So we get a question about
altenative SQL server. In fact there are not too much from open
source SQL servers, I think only 2 serious: PostgreSQL and MaxDB.
May I sak you about words for advocacy or accusation for each of
these database servers?

Our tasks: static content generation but using of complicated
search feature on the web site.

Any suggestions are very appreciated.

My suggestion would be to try a content management system like Drupal
(http://drupal.org). It supports both MySQL and PostgreSQL, so you
could design a system that works with both databases and choose the
one that best fits your requirements. It has lots of powerful
features and a nice modular architecture which makes it easy to
extend and customize.

See the link below for some information about installing Drupal with
PostgreSQL and some early discussion about integrating tsearch2 into
Drupal.

http://pgedit.com/install_drupal

John DeSoi, Ph.D.
http://pgedit.com/
Power Tools for PostgreSQL

Le Jeudi 10 Novembre 2005 19:30, John DeSoi a écrit :

My suggestion would be to try a content management system like Drupal
(http://drupal.org). It supports both MySQL and PostgreSQL, so you
could design a system that works with both databases and choose the
one that best fits your requirements. It has lots of powerful
features and a nice modular architecture which makes it easy to
extend and customize.

May I add that our http://www.PostgreSQLFr.org french speaking PostgreSQL
community website runs under Drupal since summer 2004.

We are very happy with it, it completely respond our needs.

You'll just have to install pgpool and set on internal "Drupal cache" to have
a professional CMS running.

My 2 cents.

--
Jean-Paul Argudo
Trésorier de PostgreSQLFr
http://www.PostgreSQLFr.org

On 11/9/05, Nicolay A Vasiliev <nvasiliev@whiteriversoft.com> wrote:

Hello there!

I'd like to ask the PostgreSQL community for the conseptual thing. We
develop our web sites using MySQL. We like this for its high speed and
fulltext search feature. But nowadays our projects are growing fast and
we afraid our MySQL won't be able to perform large amount of complex
complicated queries. So we get a question about altenative SQL server.
In fact there are not too much from open source SQL servers, I think
only 2 serious: PostgreSQL and MaxDB. May I sak you about words for
advocacy or accusation for each of these database servers?

Run as fast as you can away from MaxDB. I've looked at the source in detail,
and my money is that mysql ab will never really do anything with it. It's
just a huge mess. The documentation is probably the worst I have ever seen,
the command line utilities have so many options and are so poorly documented
that it takes forever to figure out how to do the most basic stuff.
Exporting and importing data is also a pain. I really can't say enough bad
things about MaxDB. Maybe it was good a few years ago, but right now it's a
huge step backwards from most anything else you could use, including mysql.

Chris