I recently attended a training that Kevin Kempter hosted. It was a really great two night session aimed at experienced DBAs/Developers so that they could learn PostgreSQL. Kevin has a lot of experience with postgres and wanted to help share that experience with other folks. He's finding a growing need for PgSQL developers in the Denver area and wants to build up a user group and network here so that companies deciding whether to use PostgreSQL or not will see an available local talent pool here in Colorado.

PostgreSQL for my uses in Drupal

His presentation was thorough and well prepared showing Kevin's experience and knowledge of the subject. Personally it wasn't clear to me that PostgreSQL would be better for my needs than MySQL. In some quick tests MySQL was about twice as fast in my benchmarking of a local drupal site (using ab -c2 -n1000). I tried a couple different settings inside of drupal (cache enabled or not) and MySQL was consistently quite a bit faster. Kevin seemed to feel that PostgreSQL by default isn't very fast, but with tuning it can be much faster. However, you can always tune the database and get many times better performance - so if you tune both PostgreSQL and MySQL then which one will be faster - it's hard to say?

Either way I was very please to learn a lot more. PostgreSQL's need for vacuuming seems like a real pain - but apparently autovacuum is on its way to take care of this automatically.

PostgreSQL Training and Services in Denver

If you are interested in training or services with PostgreSQL in or near Denver, I definitely recommend getting in touch with Kevin.