Thread: postgresql basic info

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On 7/27/10 3:37 AM, Lazarin Toni wrote:
> I am Oracle DBA and i will be maybe work on a project where postgresql
> database will be used.
>
> So i would be greatful if you could please advise me on the folowing :
>
> · Estimated time for postgresql latest RDBMS software instalation and
> configuration (does it takes longer on windows or on linux)

Most of your time will be spent wondering what you've overlooked, thinking it couldn't possibly be that simple.

Seriously, if you know Linux or BSD admin, you can download it from source, compile and have a working database in
about30 minutes.  If your distro has Postgres, then your installation time is zero. 

You'll spend some time tuning your configuration file for your particular needs.  The postgres-performance mailing is a
goodplace to ask this question. 

The most important considerations are common to both Postgres and Oracle.  That is, what kind of hardware do you have,
andis it sufficient to your workload?  CPUs, disks, memory, RAID config, and so on.  That's also a question for the
postgres-performancemailing list. 

> · Are there any prefered OS, like windows or linux etc ... ?

BSD or Linux.  Windows is considered a second-tier platform for Postgres.

> · Estimated time for import of 50gb of data from older postgres to the
> newly instaled postgres?

Depends a lot on your hardware, and also on the nature of the data (lots of indexes will add time).  It also depends
howyou do it.  pg_dump/pg_restore are pretty fast.  This would probably take a few hours on a reasonable mid-sized
server,for example, with an 8-disk RAID 10 array with a battery-backed RAID controller. 

Craig

Lazarin Toni <Toni.Lazarin@kapsch.net> wrote:

> * Estimated time for postgresql latest RDBMS software instalation
>   and configuration (does it takes longer on windows or on linux)

That depends.  On a kubuntu system which didn't have PostgreSQL
installed, I typed:

sudo apt-get install postgresql

I had a running cluster in about 50 seconds.  On the other hand,
when I'm going to install a new major release for our production
system, I read up on it, download source, build the core product and
our home-grown extensions, and test that everything seems to be
working OK.  Just the builds and basic tests can take an hour.  At
least half that is because of our home-grown extensions, though.
The study and the tests of our applications is very dependent on the
specific changes in the new release.

> * Are there any prefered OS, like windows or linux etc ... ?

I think the best benchmarks I've seen have been on FreeBSD, although
I think Linux is more popular.  I would stay away from Windows.  It
seems as though AIX and Solaris tend to have more build issues with
special packages than some.

> * Estimated time for import of 50gb of data from older postgres
>   to the newly instaled postgres?

That's going to depend on the hardware, line speed (if across the
wire), OS, configuration, etc.  Ballpark, for our databases and
hardware a 50GB pg_dump | psql load (the normal route for major
version upgrade) would take 30 to 40 minutes.  We use a different
configuration for such a conversion or bulk load, and then
reconfigure for production; this allows us to turn off fsync and
full page writes for the load, which would not be safe for normal
use.

-Kevin