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

1 point·saurabh··3 comments

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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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.

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.

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

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