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0 pointskbenson10y ago0 comments

> SELECT EXPLAIN ANALYZE will tell if its relevant for you

That assumes I run PostgreSQL already, which I don't. I am interested in possibly switching at some point if it's worthwhile, but it's hard to muster the effort to do concerted testing of a representative sample of my data, including possibly changing how queries are done to take advantage of specific features, when I have little information to go on.

Not that I expect PostreSQL to do in-depth analysis of everything, but it would be great from both a promotional and technical standpoint if there was something like "we've seen something like X% speedup of queries utilizing Y, and up to Z% speedup in extreme cases." I mean, I assume they at least have rudimentary numbers for this, otherwise they would be making blind changes without knowing whether it improved or degraded performance. Providing just enough to get people interested in doing their own benchmarking (and possibly publishing them) would be great for everyone.

Edit: One of top comment is actually what I'm talking about (but apparently for a different feature). So it does get done, which is really nice. :)

Edit2: Now there's the link to the blog post for this feature. :)

0 comments

Someone10y ago

If you aren't using it now, and thus don't know how fast or slow it would be on your data and queries, why would you care about percentage speed ups?

It could be a 1% speed up from insanely fast to slightly more insanely fast, or a 100% speed up from unbearably slow to just extremely annoyingly slow.

I gather that people considering migrating who want some reassurance before investing time in testing should be more interested in such things things as benchmarks that show whether PostgreSQL can saturate your hardware for various query types, benchmarks that compare its query planner against that of competitors, and benchmarks that show how well it works under load.

kbensonOP10y ago

>> I am interested in possibly switching at some point if it's worthwhile

> If you aren't using it now, and thus don't know how fast or slow it would be on your data and queries, why would you care about percentage speed ups?

I'm working under the assumption that similar operations between PostgreSQL and MySQL for operations that aren't using an advanced feature that the other plainly doesn't support will be roughly comparable in performance. I understand this isn't true, but it's useful in that it gives me a baseline to work with when reasoning without forcing me to migrate my application (or at least a significant portion of the data) to PostgreSQL just to test. If I'm then confronted with a feature that one supports and the other doesn't that has the capability to in some cases reduce the query time by an order of magnitude, then it's starts approaching the criteria needed for me to invest that time to see if it's worth migrating.

> I gather that people considering migrating who want some reassurance before investing time in testing should be more interested in such things things as benchmarks that show whether PostgreSQL can saturate your hardware for various query types

Isn't that exactly what this is? Throwing CPU cores at aggregating data to reduce time? I asked for benchmarks regarding this specific feature, to see what type of gain we were talking about with this. I didn't ask for comparisons to other databases because those benchmarks are generally harder to perform fairly, so I would have been (and am) happy with comparative gain benchmarks.

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