[HN Gopher] Is Postgres read heavy or write heavy?
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Is Postgres read heavy or write heavy?
        
       Author : soheilpro
       Score  : 82 points
       Date   : 2025-10-17 17:06 UTC (1 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.crunchydata.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.crunchydata.com)
        
       | alberth wrote:
       | Odd that OLTP wasn't mentioned in the article.
       | 
       | Postgres an an OLTP databases, which are designed for write heavy
       | workloads.
       | 
       | While that being said, I agree most people have read-heavy needs.
        
         | da_chicken wrote:
         | I disagree. I think the only people that have read-heavy needs
         | are big data and data warehouses. AI being hot right now
         | doesn't mean big data is the only game in town.
         | 
         | Most applications are used operationally or have a mix of read
         | and write. Even on applications where the user can only consume
         | content present there, there is often more than enough data
         | capture just tracking page history to be relatively write
         | heavy.
        
           | withinboredom wrote:
           | Hmmm. Not really. Yes, everything is a mix, but for
           | applications, it very much is on the read-heavy side. Think
           | about how many queries you have to do just to display an
           | arbitrary page. You might, maybe, just maybe, net 2-3 writes
           | vs. hundreds of reads. If that starts to balance out, or even
           | flip, then you probably need to rethink your database as you
           | start to exit traditional db usage patterns. But <30% writes
           | is not write-heavy.
        
       | developper39 wrote:
       | Very usefull, and it is clear that the author knows what he is
       | talking about. Nice intro to Pg18 too.
        
       | gdulli wrote:
       | Is a ball red or green? How long is a piece of string?
        
         | Rendello wrote:
         | How thick is WAL?
         | 
         | https://youtu.be/PvDBGqEykvc?t=7
        
       | lysace wrote:
       | Insipid text.
       | 
       | Also: HN needs to upgrade its bot upvoting detection tech. This
       | is embarrassing. It was proper ownage of the HN #1 position for
       | like 15 minutes straight.
        
         | akerl_ wrote:
         | The rules are pretty clear that you should not do this.
         | 
         | https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
        
           | lysace wrote:
           | Sosumi. I don't want to give my email to YC just to declare a
           | glaring issue with their discussion platform, knowing that
           | they employ multiple at least 1 full-time moderator.
           | 
           | I understand that privacy is a foreign concept to YC, but
           | that is where I'm coming from.
        
         | zug_zug wrote:
         | Off topic, but I do feel like there is a significant number of
         | things that mysteriously get to frontpage with 12-40 upvotes,
         | zero comments, and then sit there getting no more upvotes /
         | comments for like 20 minutes.
         | 
         | Personally I agree that it's both possible to detect this
         | better and would actually drastically improve the quality of
         | this site if that wasn't the meta and think it's something that
         | should be openly discussed (in terms of practical suggestions).
        
       | jagged-chisel wrote:
       | > When someone asks about [database] tuning, I always say "it
       | depends".
       | 
       | Indeed. On your schema. On your usage. On your app. On your
       | users.
        
       | rednafi wrote:
       | Despite using CTEs, I found the first query quite impenetrable.
       | Could be because I don't spend that much time reading non-trivial
       | SQL queries.
       | 
       | I've been mostly using the `pg_stat_statements` table (the second
       | technique) to find out whether my workload is read or write
       | heavy, it's plenty good in most situations.
        
       ___________________________________________________________________
       (page generated 2025-10-18 23:00 UTC)