On 8/14/07, Kenneth Downs <ken@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > RPK wrote: > > I want to know whether MVCC has cons also. Is it heavy on resources? How > > PGSQL MVCC relates with SQL Server 2005 new Snapshot Isolation. > > > > Speaking as an end-user, I can give only one I've ever seen, which is > performance. Because of MVCC, Postgres's write performance (insert and > update) appears on my systems to be almost exactly linear to row size. > Inserting 1000 rows into a table with row size 100 characters takes > twice as long as inserting 1000 rows into a table with row size 50 > characters. You were half right. Inserts in PostgreSQL perform similar to other databases (or at least, use similar mechanisms). It's the updates that suffer, because this translates to delete + insert essentially. Databases that use simple locking strategies can simply update the record in place. PostgreSQL wins in terms of better concurrency (especially in long transactions or transactions that touch a lot of records), cheap rollbacks, and all the advantages of a sophisticated locking engine (transactional ddl for example). merlin ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 3: Have you checked our extensive FAQ? http://www.postgresql.org/docs/faq