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Is Postgres read heavy or write heavy?

Is Postgres read heavy or write heavy?

8 comments

·October 17, 2025
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gdulli

Is a ball red or green? How long is a piece of string?

Rendello

How thick is WAL?

https://youtu.be/PvDBGqEykvc?t=7

developper39

Very usefull, and it is clear that the author knows what he is talking about. Nice intro to Pg18 too.

lysace

Insipid text.

Also: HN needs to upgrade it's bot upvoting detection tech. This is embarrassing.

aminowana

[flagged]

alberth

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

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.

jagged-chisel

> When someone asks about [database] tuning, I always say “it depends”.

Indeed. On your schema. On your usage. On your app. On your users.