Peter Marklund's Home

Every now and then I like to pick on MySQL and it's become something of a running theme in this blog. My session table for this blog (which runs on Ruby on Rails of course) had grown too big so I needed to clean it up. I just didn't expect it to take this long:

mysql> select count(*) from sessions;
+----------+
| count(*) |
+----------+
|   545797 | 
+----------+
1 row in set (2.89 sec)

mysql> delete from sessions;
Query OK, 545801 rows affected (5 min 46.67 sec)

Should it really take 3 seconds to count half a million rows? I wonder if PostgreSQL would deliver better performance in this instance. As soon as I find the time I will switch over my Rails/MySQL based web application Simple Signup to PostgreSQL. I have a strong personal preference for PostgreSQL over MySQL. I'm curious to see what the transition will be like though.