Final decision

I spent a great deal of time over the past week looking seriously at
Postgres and MYSQL.

Objectively I am not seeing that much of an improvement in speed with MYSQL,
and we have a huge investment in postgrs.

So I am planning on sticking with postgres fro our production database
(going live this weekend).

Many people have offered a great deal of help and I appreciate all that time
and energy.

I did not find any resolutions to my issues with Commandprompt.com (we only
worked together 2.5 hours).

Most of my application is working about the same speed as MSSQL server
(unfortunately its twice the speed box, but as many have pointed out it
could be an issue with the 4 proc dell). I spent considerable time with Dell
and could see my drives are delivering 40 meg per sec.

Things I still have to make better are my settings in config, I have it set
to no merge joins and no seq scans.

I am going to have to use flattened history files for reporting (I saw huge
difference here the view for audit cube took 10 minutes in explain analyze
and the flattened file took under one second).

I understand both of these practices are not desirable, but I am at a place
where I have to get it live and these are items I could not resolve.

I may try some more time with Commanpromt.com, or seek other professional
help.

In stress testing I found Postgres was holding up very well (but my IIS
servers could not handle much of a load to really push the server).

I have a few desktops acting as IIS servers at the moment and if I pushed
past 50 consecutive users it pretty much blew the server up.

On inserts that number was like 7 consecutive users and updates was also
like 7 users.

I believe that was totally IIS not postgres, but I am curious as to if using
postgres odbc will put more stress on the IIS side then MSSQL did.

I did have a question if any folks are using two servers one for reporting
and one for data entry what system should be the beefier?

I have a 2proc machine I will be using and I can either put Sears off by
themselves on this machine or split up functionality and have one for
reporting and one for inserts and updates; so not sure which machine would
be best for which spot (reminder the more robust is a 4proc with 8 gigs and
2 proc is 4 gigs, both dells).

Thank you for any ideas in this arena.

Joel Fradkin