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MVCC – the part of PostgreSQL we hate the most (2023)


The Part of PostgreSQL We Hate the Most, Andy Pavlo - Carnegie Mellon University,

So instead of writing yet another blog article like everyone else touting the awesomeness of everyone’s favorite elephant-themed DBMS, we want to discuss the one major thing that sucks: how PostgreSQL implements multi-version concurrency control(MVCC). Our research at Carnegie Mellon University and experience optimizing PostgreSQL database instances on Amazon RDS have shown that its MVCC implementation is the worst among the other widely used relational DBMSs, including MySQL, Oracle, and Microsoft SQL Server. Although PostgreSQL’s autovacuum will eventually remove these dead tuples, write-heavy workloads can cause them to accumulate faster than the vacuum can catch up, resulting in continuous database growth.

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