Postgres Hstore vs. Redis - performance wise

Question

I read about HStores in Postgres something that is offered by Redis as well.

Our application is written in NodeJS. Two questions:

• Performance-wise, is Postgres HStore comparable to Redis?

• for session storage, what would you recommend--Redis, or Postgres with some other kind of data type (like HStore, or maybe even the usual relational table)? And how bad is one option vs the other?

Another constraint, is that we will need to use the data that is already in PostgreSQL and combine it with the active sessions (which we aren't sure where to store at this point, if in Redis or PostgreSQL).

From what we have read, we have been pointed out to use Redis as a Session manager, but due to the PostgreSQL constraint, we are not sure how to combine both and the possible performance issues that may arise.

Thanks!

Answer 1

Redis will be faster than Postgres because Pg offers reliability guarantees on your data (when the transaction is committed, it is guaranteed to be on disk), whereas Redis has a concept of writing to disk when it feels like it, so shouldn't be used for critical data.

Redis seems like a good option for your session data, or heck even store in a cookie or in your client side Javascript. But if you need data from your database on every request then it might not be even worth involving Redis. It very much depends on your application.

Answer 2

Using PostgreSQL as session manager is usually bad idea.

For older than 9.1 was physical limit of transaction per second based on persistent media parameters. For session management you usually don't need MGA (because there are not collision) and it means so MGA is overhead and databases without MGA and ACID must be significantly faster (10 or 100).

I know a use case, where PostgreSQL was used for session management and Performance was really terrible and unstable - it was eshop with about 10000 living sessions. When session management was moved to memcached, then performance and stability was significantly increased. PostgreSQL can be used for 100 living session without problem probably. For higher numbers there are better tools.