PostgreSQL certainly has a reputation. It's known for having a rich feature set and very stable software releases. The secure stance that its default configuration takes is simultaneously praised by security fans and criticized for its learning curve. The SQL-specification conformance and data integrity features allow only the strictest ways to interact with the database, which is surprising to those who come from a background working with looser desktop database software. All of these points have an element of truth to them.
Another part of PostgreSQL's reputation is that it's slow. This, too, has some truth to it, even today. There are many database operations where the right thing takes longer to do than the alternative. As the simplest example of this, consider the date February 29, 2009. With no leap year in 2009, that date is only valid as an abstract one. It's not possible for this to be the real date of something that happened. If you ask the database to store this value into a standard date field, it can just do that, the fast approach. Alternatively, it can check whether that date is valid to store into the destination field, note that there is no such date in a regular calendar, and reject your change. That's always going to be slower. PostgreSQL is designed by, and intended for, the sort of people who don't like cutting corners just to make things faster or easier, and in cases where the only way you can properly handle something takes a while, that may be the only option available.
However, once you have a correct implementation of something, you can then go back and optimize it. That's the mode PostgreSQL has been in for the last few years. PostgreSQL usually rises above these smaller issues to give excellent database performance. Parts of it have the sort of great design that outperforms simpler approaches, even after paying the overhead that complexity can introduce. This is a fairly recent phenomenon though, which explains quite a bit about the perception that PostgreSQL is a slower database than its competitors. In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:
- Performance of historical PostgreSQL releases
- PostgreSQL or another database?
- PostgreSQL tools
- PostgreSQL application scaling life cycle
- Performance tuning as a practice
