Comment by allthetime
3 days ago
Postgres is the materially better (more performant and ergonomic) choice if those are your requirements.
IMO the only place Maria wins is in ease of use / ops.
MariaDB's MEMORY engine has annoying limitations like no variable-length columns, no BLOB/TEXT support, and data loss on restart.
Postgres handles this much better… Unlogged tables skip write-ahead logging so they're fast, but still support all data types, full transactions, and B-tree indexes by default. you can point the data directory at a tmpfs RAM disk and get full in-memory speed with zero feature compromises.
> no variable-length columns
Both varchar and varbinary columns work fine there. Blobs are indeed missing.
> data loss on restart
That’s OK, collections in memory do as well yet we use them pretty much everywhere.
> Unlogged tables skip write-ahead logging
I don’t want any disk I/O for my memory tables.
Another thing, aren’t PostgreSQL tables without write-ahead logging cause consistency bugs after restart when normal tables are current due to the logging, unlogged tables are old?