Postgre SQL database

[SEO practioner]

Does anybody here have any experience with Postgre SQL databases?

We are starting a new project and we've never developed anything with it yet, but we are considering it. However, I am getting conflicting opinions about it:

- Some say it is much slower than SQL server (is that true?)
- Some love it because it has all the triggers (we need them too)

Mostly, some love it because it is open source too. Now we need triggers, so that rules out MySQL. Personally, I'm not too fond of Microsoft either, so it sort of narrows it down. Oracle is out of the question on this project, because of budget considerations.

Does anybody here can clear me on this or give me directions and/or any previous experiences some webmasters could have had with Postgre in the past? How is their collaborative tech support? Any good?

Thanks to everybody for any help you can give me here.

Cheers

[SEO practioner]

I forgot to say: you can sticky me if it's easier too

Thanks

[espeed]

I have worked with Oracle, Postgres, MS SQL Server, and MySQL -- I use Postgres for most projects.

Postgres can be tuned to be sufficiently fast -- as an example, one of my Postgres 7.2 sites batch inserts/updates 700K+ items each night, and it executes in ~2.5 hours (it could run faster, but the system needs more memory -- it's swapping virtual memory in which slows it down).

A few years ago, I ran benchmarks on Postgres 7.0.3 -- you can view them at [jamesthornton.com...]

Last week, I received e-mail from someone saying that his Postgres 7.2 results were similar to mine, but his 7.3 results were much faster -- executing 10K inserts in <10 secs *with fsync on* (<7 secs with fsync off).

[treylane]

There were some significant speed problems with PostgreSQL years ago that made it pretty much unsuitable for a lot of projects, so MySQL became the open source database of choice. Somehow Postgres has never outgrown that stigma.

TODAY, Postgres is fast, stable, reasonably full-featured, and a generally great system. The only real drawback to it that I can think of is that most existing web/database projects have been written to use MySQL so you'd need to start from scratch or sit around and tweak all the database code to use Postgres.

Most of the PostgreSQL vs. oracle/mysql/etc articles you're likely to run across are pretty dated since all these databases have progressed RAPIDLY over the last couple years.

[espeed]

OpenACS (Open Architecture Community System - [openacs.org)...] is an advanced open-source toolkit for building scalable, community-oriented web applications. It runs on AOLserver, a web/application server, Oracle or PostgreSQL.

[bcc1234]

PostgreSQL is good if you can get sufficient amount of RAM.
I honestly don't know why people use MySQL when something like PostgreSQL is available.

It's no match for Oracle or DB2, but with mid-size projects you'll never be sorry you picked it.