As is probably common knowledge by now, I’ve migrated from Bloglines – my former feed reader of choice – to the shiny new Ajax client Feedlounge. You may remember Feedlounge from such posts as Greasemonkey and Gmail, Revisited, The Bucks Start Here, and Bye For Now, Bloglines.[1] Some of you might also know – seeing as I mentioned it only a few days ago – that I’ve been hearing good things about Postgres from a variety of sources. As it turns out, the two are not unrelated.
As we heard from Alex yesterday, the cause of the downtime over the weekend was so that Feedlounge could be cut over from MySQL to Postgres. Among the reasons for the switch were a marginal major savings in total storage and major savings in DB load time. Throw in some better memory utilization and the attraction of some Postgres bells and whistles, and it made sense for Alex and Scott to make the move.
Is Postgres always going to be the better choice? Not at all. But when I said that Sun was choosing to support Postgres at an interesting time, it’s case studies like these that back that up.
Update: Alex was kind enough to point out that the total storage savings was anything but marginal. I had misread the savings as 10+ GB’s in MySQL to 9.6 in Postgres when the actual numbers were 34 GBs in MySQL to the aforementioned 9.6 in Postgres – a sizable difference. Appreciate the correction.
[1] For the Simpsons fans in the audience, yes, the phrasing was intentional.
