Re: Postgres standard versus Postgres Plus Advanced Server

On 12/02/10 01:20, Robert James wrote:
> Hi. I'm setting up a new workstation (Win7 64bit Quad Core 4GB) with
> Postgres, for development work, and trying to pick which version I
> should install. Most of the time, Postgres is dormant - I'm not using
> it all - but when I do use it, the load can be high, and I want
> maximum performance.

Maximum performance from a 4GB machine with Windows 7 and presumably the
usual RAM-chewing Windows dev tools? When you aren't going to have any
data cached because the server is mostly dormant? And only one disk
(wild guess)? You'll be lucky.

On the other hand, you don't say what you consider a high load to be,
how much data you will have or what "maximum performance" would mean to
you. So - you might be fine.

Just go with the standard PostgreSQL, unless you're interested in buying
a support contract. If you ask questions on the list you'll get many
more people who are running the standard setup rather than one of the
commercial offshoots. They are fine products, but unless you're buying
support or testing shows a particular benefit, don't worry.

Once installed, you'll probably want to tune some of the settings. There
are guides on the wiki, and if you have python installed on your
machine, pgtune might be useful.
http://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Performance_Optimization
http://pgfoundry.org/projects/pgtune/
If the database is just for development purposes and you don't mind the
risk of corruption if your power fails, you could turn fsync off in the
config too. Not recommended for production use, but will reduce disk load.

Quick upgrades to your workstation might include more RAM and more disks
(perhaps consider an SSD?)

--
Richard Huxton
Archonet Ltd