If you are running PostgreSQL with default configuration and trying to populate your database with INSERTs, then yes, the performance may be less than impressive.
But there is few tricks one can do: 1) use COPY instead of INSERT, 2) loosen reliability guarantees (WAL, sync commits) in configuration, 3) define your table as UNLOGGED.
This will bring your insertion speed close to MongoDB. And probably reliability will still be better than Mongo's.
Posted Dec 20, 2012 16:41 UTC (Thu) by pboddie (subscriber, #50784)
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To get most of the way there, just choose trick #1 in that list. In any book about PostgreSQL performance, that trick should have a chapter by itself consisting of the words "Use COPY instead of INSERT" in very big letters with some smaller print used to clarify stuff like how to do COPY-like operations instead of using the full-privilege COPY, and so on.