

Ask HN: Why and what do you use PostgreSQL for? - saurabh

How do you use it in your web apps? Do you use it as a KV store? What PostgreSQL specific feature do you use? How have you tuned it for your specific case? How have you scaled it? I would love to hear how PostgreSQL's features are used in a variety of scenarios.
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traxtech
I often select PostgreSQL for my clients, generally strictly adhering to the
relational paradigms and letting the web caching layer keeping out the
performance problems. PostgreSQL installations I saw are almost never tuned,
except few paramers like effective_cache_size and the use of a separate raid
array for the transaction log.

Scaling I saw is done vertically : faster hardware, more memory, SSD in raid
10. One of my clients tried once an horizontal scaling (with C-JDBC) but
reverted back and bought a monster hardware.

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read_wharf
Back my Django site, because it's one of the databases on Django's list and I
hear better things about PostgeSQL than MySQL. I have not taken any of the
other actions on your list (yet).

My non-expert impression from reading around is that Postgres has a better
future than MySQL, and is just a better solution. Oracle's clouding of MySQL's
future didn't help it when I made my decision.

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bartonfink
I use it extensively for the PostGIS extensions. I do a lot of work with
geospatial data, and extensions to commercial databases get expensive.

