Some questions about Postgres

Started by Siddharth Jainover 3 years ago5 messagesgeneral
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#1Siddharth Jain
siddhsql@gmail.com

Hi all,

I am new to Postgres. I read an old article comparing MySQL to Postgres and
wanted to get answers to following questions. All questions are w.r.t.
Postgres 14:

- do postgres secondary indexes point directly to tuples on disk?
- does postgres use a separate process for each connection?
- does postgres use any application cache similar to innodb_buffer_pool?

Thanks a lot. If you can provide references to documentation, that would be
great.

#2Christophe Pettus
xof@thebuild.com
In reply to: Siddharth Jain (#1)
Re: Some questions about Postgres

On Nov 3, 2022, at 10:38, Siddharth Jain <siddhsql@gmail.com> wrote:
I read an old article comparing MySQL to Postgres and wanted to get answers to following questions.

Given your questions, I suspect that you read the technical note from Uber about why they switched back to MySQL from PostgreSQL. There are quite a few responses out there to it, including:

https://thebuild.com/presentations/uber-perconalive-2017.pdf

To answer the specific questions:

1. Yes, all PostgreSQL indexes point directly to tuples on disk. They do not point to a primary key (which a table might not even have).

2. Yes, each backend connection to PostgreSQL is a separate process. The usual way of mitigating any performance issues this might introduce is to use a pooler such as pgbouncer.

3. This is equivalent to PostgreSQL's shared buffers.

#3Siddharth Jain
siddhsql@gmail.com
In reply to: Christophe Pettus (#2)
Re: Some questions about Postgres

Thanks Christophe. Yes that is the article and I read the response as well.

On Thu, Nov 3, 2022 at 10:42 AM Christophe Pettus <xof@thebuild.com> wrote:

Show quoted text

On Nov 3, 2022, at 10:38, Siddharth Jain <siddhsql@gmail.com> wrote:
I read an old article comparing MySQL to Postgres and wanted to get

answers to following questions.

Given your questions, I suspect that you read the technical note from Uber
about why they switched back to MySQL from PostgreSQL. There are quite a
few responses out there to it, including:

https://thebuild.com/presentations/uber-perconalive-2017.pdf

To answer the specific questions:

1. Yes, all PostgreSQL indexes point directly to tuples on disk. They do
not point to a primary key (which a table might not even have).

2. Yes, each backend connection to PostgreSQL is a separate process. The
usual way of mitigating any performance issues this might introduce is to
use a pooler such as pgbouncer.

3. This is equivalent to PostgreSQL's shared buffers.

#4Laurenz Albe
laurenz.albe@cybertec.at
In reply to: Christophe Pettus (#2)
Re: Some questions about Postgres

On Thu, 2022-11-03 at 10:42 -0700, Christophe Pettus wrote:

On Nov 3, 2022, at 10:38, Siddharth Jain <siddhsql@gmail.com> wrote:
I read an old article comparing MySQL to Postgres and wanted to get answers to following questions.

Given your questions, I suspect that you read the technical note from Uber about why they switched back
to MySQL from PostgreSQL.  There are quite a few responses out there to it, including:

        https://thebuild.com/presentations/uber-perconalive-2017.pdf

This is also insightful: https://use-the-index-luke.com/blog/2016-07-29/on-ubers-choice-of-databases

Yours,
Laurenz Albe

#5Siddharth Jain
siddhsql@gmail.com
In reply to: Laurenz Albe (#4)
Re: Some questions about Postgres

Thanks Laurenz.

On Fri, Nov 4, 2022 at 1:55 AM Laurenz Albe <laurenz.albe@cybertec.at>
wrote:

Show quoted text

On Thu, 2022-11-03 at 10:42 -0700, Christophe Pettus wrote:

On Nov 3, 2022, at 10:38, Siddharth Jain <siddhsql@gmail.com> wrote:
I read an old article comparing MySQL to Postgres and wanted to get

answers to following questions.

Given your questions, I suspect that you read the technical note from

Uber about why they switched back

to MySQL from PostgreSQL. There are quite a few responses out there to

it, including:

https://thebuild.com/presentations/uber-perconalive-2017.pdf

This is also insightful:
https://use-the-index-luke.com/blog/2016-07-29/on-ubers-choice-of-databases

Yours,
Laurenz Albe