FeedLounge now running on PostgreSQL : FeedLounge:

Back in August, we switched the FeedLounge database from MySQL’s MyISAM tables to InnoDB tables. This solved a number of problems that we were having with the MyISAM tables, but also introduced a number of other issues including slower performance on a number of queries (counting in particular). As we did more and more research into how to solve these problems, we decided that one promising solution would be to switch to a PostgreSQL database instead of a MySQL database altogether.

That is what we were testing this weekend, and the alpha server is now running live with a PostgreSQL database instead of the MySQL database. This is still in “testing” mode - if we run into any serious issues we might switch back (temporarily or permanently) to the MySQL database (which will have data current through last Friday evening).

Some of the reasons we decided to make the switch to PostgreSQL:

• Database size - when we switched from MyISAM tables to InnoDB tables in MySQL, the size of our database grew from ~1GB to 10+GB! When we made the switch this weekend, the MySQL InnoDB database was using 34 GB, and the same data in a PostgreSQL database is only 9.6 GB - this should keep our hardware costs down a bit.
• Load time - The current MySQL setup takes over a day to restore the current database, the load of the data into the PostgreSQL database took just over 4 hours.