Comments on: Postgres for the win!

By: Artacus

Artacus — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 06:23:38 +0000

Good read. I’m an Oracle developer too. But a year and a half ago, we did a project where the cost of Oracle was out of the question. So we turned to Postgres. And we’re continually amazed by it.

IB, sequence isn’t a data type it is a sequence generator that returns int. Pg does have a serial pseudo type that makes the column int4, creates the sequence and sets the default value… much like an autoinc column in MySQL.

By: Gorlok

Gorlok — Sat, 25 Apr 2009 01:33:46 +0000

Hi. I’m an old “Oracle guy”, and I think Postgres is a killer db. But like you say: it’s no always easy to get aproval from management. Sharing stories like this is very useful. Thank you.

By: IB

IB — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 22:44:52 +0000

I am a Big Postgres fan as well.

I recommend Sequence as primary key.
http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.3/static/sql-createsequence.html

It provides a lot flexibility. You can use it as AutoIncrement as well.

By: florin

florin — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 15:32:32 +0000

Thank you for this post. We’re using PostgreSql too and are pleased whenever we learn other people have success with it too.

Your experience will really help other people with their decisions.

By: Mike Johnson

Mike Johnson — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 15:05:20 +0000

Sure. Postgres’ int types are whole numbers but numeric is arbitrary precision, which can store up to a 1000 digits.

Check out the docs:
http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.3/static/datatype-numeric.html

Anyway, by ID I should have probably said “primary key,” but the gist is use the best data type for your data. Postgres does make it trivial to change later, too.

By: mibuser

mibuser — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 14:52:31 +0000

I’m also a postgres fan (a beginner though) :)

Can you please elaborate this – Lessons learned: “Don’t use numeric for ID columns”.

By: Mike Johnson

Mike Johnson — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 15:24:16 +0000

Cool, thanks for stopping by. It was a fun project.

By: Alex Kane

Alex Kane — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 14:24:14 +0000

Thanks for posting this Postgresql/Oracle comparison, I found it to be an interesting read. I’ve been following your Pg/Oracle posts and looking forward to more in the future.