macOS Tutorial: Installing & Running Postgres on Mac OS X

[will]

I have created a quick tutorial on installing and running Postgres on Mac OS X:
http://flux.org.uk/howto/postgres/macosx

Comments and suggestions welcome.

 

[iSee]

Nice!
I've been meaning to look into it, just out of curiosity.
I guess I've got a good excuse now.
I'll see if I can give it a try this week some time (on Leopard 10.5.1).

 

[Nugget]

PostgreSQL is such an excellent database. I honestly do not understand why any developer would choose to use MySQL. PostgreSQL is better and free-er.

 

[SC68Cal]

Why are you installing this in ~/Applications? Why don't we just follow the standard install procedure?

 

[ChrisA]

PostgreSQL is such an excellent database. I honestly do not understand why any developer would choose to use MySQL. PostgreSQL is better and free-er.

I've used both. Once I really wanted to use PostgreSQL but we prototyped using each DBMS and fond for our simple application MySQL outperformed PstgreSQL by a factor of more then ten. Basically we were just using a DBMS table as a queue. One writer and mutliple readers. We had a real time application that needed to store snapshots of the current state and there were about 10 readers who woud periodically read out subsets of the data to drive their "real time-ish" displays. we had tens of millions of records per hour.

In our tests, MySQL did the job but as you added more users (readers) PostgreSQL would eventually catch up. It seems postgres was smarter about how it handles locks and multiple readers can share a lock while MySQL did very course grain locking forcing user to wait for locks. It was simpler so it was faster for a low number of users we had.

 

[will]

Why are you installing this in ~/Applications? Why don't we just follow the standard install procedure?

I chose to show how to install there so that all users, even those without root, could install it. I do plan to add info on an install under /usr.

 

[SC68Cal]

I chose to show how to install there so that all users, even those without root, could install it. I do plan to add info on an install under /usr.

Doesn't it install there by default? I'd just toss it there since it's usually run as a daemon anyway. It's a good idea because then it'll also be protected by root ownership and permissions.

I just start to get antsy when someone installs a major system component like that in a non-traditional area because it can cause problems down the line as an administrator.