How good is Rails and PostgreSQL support?

Question

I am thinking of working on a Rails application that uses PostgreSQL. I have some questions before I am comfortable using Rails:

• Is PostgreSQL support in Rails less superior than, say, MySQL.
• Would it feel any different if using PostgreSQL?
• Are there any cases where using PostgreSQL fail to work?

Thanks.

Answer 1

After having used sqlite, mysql and postgresql with Rails, I prefer using postrgresql.

Installation for OSX, Ubuntu and Windows went well as opposed to buggy installs for other DBs.

I had to install the following gem to use postgresql: install gem postgres-pr

It may "feel" different when you come across complex databse requests where you add in special conditions such as extracting the month from a date as the actual text will differ depending on the database system. Also, postgresql delimits strings in request with E'' so sometimes a request using a text-field may come up with an error if you're not careful with your :conditions => [].

Answer 2

PostgreSQL support with rails is excellent - I would not hesitate to use it.

If you are looking for examples, Planet Argon is a high-profile web development house that primarily does Rails with PostgreSQL in the background. You can read more about their work at Robby Russel's blog.

Heroku uses PostgreSQL exclusively for their Ruby web hosting - including lots of Rails deploys, of course.

Answer 3

At my employers we use PostgreSQL exclusively, for a large Rails application. We use complex queries etc and so far had no problem with Rails & Postgres itself.

However, if you rely a lot on 3rd party plugins that work on top or beside ActiveRecord, you might want to check their support for Postgres. E.g we ran into inconsistencies using the searchlogic plugin.

Answer 4

Postgres support is very good, albeit support for writing plpgsql functions, triggers and composite primary keys inside migrations leaves much to be desired.