Thank you all for taking the time to answer my questions. I've been out of the programming world for a long time, so I am back to being a newbie. I was told this is the place for newcomers to ask questions. I apologize if my questions did not contain the necessary sophistication or nuance for some to answer.
George, your answer makes the most sense. Thank you! You said:
>>Most cloud servers come preconfigured with some variation of either the "LAMP" or "LAPP" stack: i.e. Linux, Apache, MySQL or Postgresql, PHP or Python.
>>There needs to be a compelling *application* reason to install something else: a JVM (or Apache-Tomcat vs regular Apache), Ruby/Rails, Groovy/Grails, etc.
On Mon, 8 May 2017 14:26:02 -0700, Paul Hughes <paul@vivation.com> wrote: >Hello, > >I noticed that most of the largest web platforms that use PostgreSQL as >their primary database, also use Python as their primary back-end language. >Yet, according to every benchmark I could find over the last couple of >years, back-end languages like PHP, HHVM, and Node.JS outperform Python by >2x to 8x! > >So here are my questions: > >1) Why do the largest web applications that use PostgreSQL also use Python, >even though Python is significantly slower than it's biggest competitors?
Most cloud servers come preconfigured with some variation of either the "LAMP" or "LAPP" stack: i.e. Linux, Apache, MySQL or Postgresql, PHP or Python.
There needs to be a compelling *application* reason to install something else: a JVM (or Apache-Tomcat vs regular Apache), Ruby/Rails, Groovy/Grails, etc.
>2) Can PostgreSQL just as easily be used with PHP or Node.js? If not, why >not?
Absolutely. The DBMS is (programming) language neutral - the only requirement is that a client speak the wire protocol. That can be done natively, or via a library/driver.
>3) Can PostgreSQL be made to work seamlessly to take advantage of the >superior performance of HHVM or Node.js?
Not really sure what you're asking. The application running under HHVM or node.js is completely separate from Postgresql.
Both PHP and Javascript (generically and for node.js specifically) have libraries for Postgresql.