Re: Choice of DB

Nico Callewaert schrieb am 27.11.2018 um 22:08:
> First of all the Uber story scared me.
> Seems they went from Postgres to MySql because of several issues.

Some of the issues were valid, some were not.
Some of them have been addressed since then, and some (many?) could have been solved if they had asked questions on the Postgres mailing list.

You might be interested in this response: https://thebuild.com/presentations/uber-perconalive-2017.pdf

And the discussion in the Postgres community regarding that:
https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/flat/CAJBB%3DEU%2BWHcz4amzL6DDxdVsZvhWJAZQ9f_jVeV9FNW1%3Da6eBQ%40mail.gmail.com#f83e6201d8a9d5ec4be02bc70c2ffb8d

You might also want to read the discussions on Reddit and HackerNews:

https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/4uph84/why_uber_engineering_switched_from_postgres_to/
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14222721

In a Nutshell: It seems, Uber is using a relational database as a schemaless key/value store - of course that isn't going to get the most out of the database.

> It's not like we have a thousand simultanous users who are updating
> records non stop.
For a system doing non-stop simultaneous updates, Postgres most probably performs a lot better than MySQL (MariaDB).
MySQL has traditionally been faster with (mostly) read-only workloads using simple queries, but never really excelled with concurrent read/write scenarios

> I'm wondering if PostgreSQL outperforms Firebird in client/server ERP
> applications?
This is really hard to tell, and the only one who can answer that is you.
Because only you have the statements and the data to test it.

Given the recent performance improvements that happened in 9.6, 10 and 11 (including parallel query processing), I'd say chances are quite good that Postgres is at least as fast as Firebird, if not substantially faster.

Odoo, probably the most wide-spread OpenSource ERP System - runs exclusively on Postgres, and Apache OFBiz also recommends Postgres over MySQL

Thomas