PostgreSQL, a powerful open-source object-relational database system, has been lauded for its robustness, functionality, and flexibility. However, it is not without its challenges – one of which is the notorious VACUUM process. However, the dawn of a new era is upon us with OrioleDB, a novel engine designed for PostgreSQL that promises to eliminate the need for the resource-consuming VACUUM.
Postgres is great… until it's not... In the past few years, there have been a few major public outages of a cloud service, like MailChimp's Mandril, Joyent's Manta Storage, and Sentry's monitoring service. Invariably, the outages affect applications that use Postgres in write-heavy workloads.
Traditional database engines were designed in the '80s and early '90s. At that time CPUs were much slower than they are today. Even worse was storage, hard drive head positioning time was enormous1. And CPU (or, at most, a few single-core CPUs) was assumed to be infinitely fast in comparison to IOPS. Therefore, systems were designed to save IOPS as much as possible, while CPU overhead was considered a secondary optimization target.