Forum OpenACS Q&A: Largest postgresql database that I know of.

1: Largest postgresql database that I know of.

Posted by Mohan Pakkurti on 02/26/01 12:16 PM

I was talking to a sysadmin for a large government institution here
in Sweden, and he mentioned in passing that they have been using a
very expensive RDBMS for a long time, and recently have been
switching to postgresql and it has been quite good for them.

I could not extract any information from the admin about the kind of
applications they use it for, but the interesting information was
that the database size was close to a terabyte, and they use it was a
write intensive application. Reading is done when needed from the
database as a separate analysis step.

The platform is a huge cluster of Redhat 6.2 machines and postgresql
7.0.

2: Response to Largest postgresql database that I know of. (response to 1)

Posted by Don Baccus on 02/27/01 04:39 PM

That's pretty cool...

One of the hole cards held by Postgres is that the traditional users in past times were using it to hold things like astronomical data. Single or a few users using a massive database in a lab.

So while PG has historically had problems with reliability, with being very slow on simple selects (always fsynch'd the log, ugh, a killer for websites!), etc it has always been capable of handling large datasets. Big tables get split into multiple files automatically, etc etc.

So I'm not terribly surprised at the success story you've posted. At the moment, PG's main problem when one's running really huge databases is that there's no in-database support for placing tables and indices in separate filesystems, for instance onto different drives. You need to move files by hand and soft-link them. This is admin-unfriendly, and will change, hopefully in PG 7.2 ...

3: Response to Largest postgresql database that I know of. (response to 1)

Posted by Roberto Mello on 02/27/01 05:18 PM

BTW, I just read in the pgsql-hackers list that PG 7.1 will be released in 2 weeks or so, with a RC1 this week.