Re: [vox] PostgreSQL vs. Oracle

[Don Werve <donwMAPS@examen.com>]

On Fri, Feb 01, 2002 at 11:23:15AM -0800, Rod Roark wrote:
> Thanks Eric, this is good stuff.
> 
> The Oracle rep's pitch is the kind of techno-nonsense that works on 
> gullible managers.  Some of what he said was true of Postgres a year or 
> more ago -- not today.
> 
> Your arguments illustrate that Oracle's support of Linux makes that kind 
> of selling more difficult.  I wonder if they are starting to regret that 
> decision!
> 
> BTW I suspect that Oracle will seriously outperform PG for databases 
> larger than 2-3 GB.  But maybe that's changed too.  It would be nice to 
> see some recent benchmarks.

I'd say that would be an accurate assesment, only because PG doesn't have
any way of dealing with raw disks (tell me if I'm wrong on this one, as 
I'd love to be); and you can't beat the performance kick that comes from 
not having to deal with the filesystem layer by using raw I/O.

Then again, anyone considering a large database on Intel hardware is insane;
there's a reason why big databases run on big iron.  Let's see an Intel 
machine hold 128 processors, talk to ten seperate fibre channel arrays, and
dynamically re-assign CPUs, memory, and I/O from a serial port.  Oh, and
we can't forget the ability to hot-swap almost every component on the 
machine with zero downtime.  That's why people like Sun, IBM, and HP are 
still in business.

But otherwise, I like Postgres, and I don't care too much for Oracle.  From
a coder's point of view, Oracle does have some neat features that aren't
present in Postgres; but, at the same time, it's nothing that can't be 
easily implemented in the DB-interface layer of an application, and for the
savings of not using Oracle...

-- 
Don Werve <donw@examen.com>
Unix System Administrator

Plus je vois les hommes, plus j'admire les chiens.
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