Use Case: French National Weather Forecast (Meteo France)

Hi all,

As we do about some years now at PostgreSQLFr.org, I just release today
(as per the first day of Solutions Linux 2008, where PostgreSQLFr has
its booth, as we do each year since 2005), a new Use Case on this Drupal
book there:

Use Cases: http://www.postgresqlfr.org/?q=node/63

Our new Use Case is about Meteo France (http://www.meteofrance.com/),
our national weather forecast services.

This use case is there, in the original french tongue:

http://www.postgresqlfr.org/?q=node/1538

I really thanks Valerie Schneider about this use case, she finally
accepted to talk about it, after months (tell me Valerie, you couldn't
stand one more mail from me, right? ;-). It wasn't easy for her to
convince the hierarchy there to talk about this usage. They finaly
accepted a few days ago.. :)

We think this kind of use case may have some interest to refresh the use
case on the postgresql.org, or to simply add more of them. So we did a
translation for this purpose. Tell us if this is of some interest to
you, we may translate some others?

I think a good Use Case, with names, e-mails and numbers are ought to
convince some IT guys out there. IMHO, a good Use Case, where an IT
speak to another IT, worth the time needed to write it down.

Thanks so much Valérie !

Here's the translation Guillaume Lelarge did:

Q: Do you agree that your name, e-mail, organization and your role in it
are made public?
A: Yes
Organization: Météo France
Website: http://www.meteo.fr
Last Name: SCHNEIDER
First Name: Valérie
Function: Engineer - DBA

Q: You are in a profit-making organization, associative or government?
A: Public service, Météo-France

Q: How many employees in your organization?
A: 3600 people all over France

Q: What is the use of the databases in your organization?
A: Most of the core applications Meteo-France use are based on databases
from several publishers:
Technical and scientific databases, some of which are real-time, so
availability and consistency are critical;
And also for needs related to commercial management and human resources.

Q: Are your databases critical to your organization?
A: Many are critical.

Q: How many databases run on PostgreSQL? How many databases (all DBMS
mixed) in your organization?
A: Approximately 10 to 20% of our databases operate under PostgreSQL.
Work is done to migrate many others, including some critical ones.

Q: What are the minimum / maximum / average number of tables per databases ?
A: In the dozen to a few hundred.
For example, a test database to conduct transactional benchmarks (for
comparisons between various DBMS) contains tables with 130,000,000
lines, which means something like 30 GB per table.

Q: What are the minimum / maximum / average size of the databases ?
A: Minimum: a few gigabytes
Maximum: 3.5 Tera-bytes, our biggest PostgreSQL database

Q: PostgreSQL is used in a transactional way or is it datamining /
datawarehouse context?
A: Both. For the largest, in datawarehouse context with few yet big
transactions (inserts of 20 gigabytes per day).

Q: Which releases do you use?
A: From 8.0.7 to 8.2.x.

Q: What kind of server do you use with PostgreSQL?
A: We mainly use Red Hat Linux servers. But some use Windows OS.

Q: Do you use FOSS in your organization? On servers? And on client PCs?
A: The share is increasingly important for economic reasons.
Almost all servers are running under Linux. Clients are mainly under
Windows.

Q: How many servers use "open source technology"? And how many servers
in your organization?
A: The total number of servers in the organization is something like a
hundred. But I don't know how many use free software.

Q: When was the first time did you use PostgreSQL? And which release?
A: We begun tests in 2003/2004 with release 7. In production since 2005
and version 8.0 for the oldest.

Q: Do PostgreSQL replace a non-free technology? If yes, which one?
A: Some applications have started on PostgreSQL. Others were a migration
from Oracle.

Q: If you replaced a proprietary technology with PostgreSQL, can you
tell us why?
A: The cost of licensing is the best argument.
Other arguments are lightness, ease of installation, good responsiveness
of the community, equivalent functionalities (in our use of RDBMS),
ecpg, SQL standard.

Q: If you replaced by a proprietary technology
PostgreSQL, have you tested other DBMS Libres? If so, which ones?
A: Not really.

Q: If you have tested other free RDBMS? Why did you choose PostgreSQL?
A: See previous answer.
Now, give ratings ranging from 1 to 5 and comment if you want.
1 = bad,
2 = fair,
3 = average,
4 = good,
5 = very good

Q: What is your feeling on PostgreSQL in terms of reliability?
A: 4

Q: Robustness?
A: 4

Q: Administration?
A: 4
The rising level remains at the moment rustic (especially for a 3.5
Terabytes database!)

Q: Ease of use?
A: 5

Q: Performance?
A: 4
Performances are satisfactory. Regarding applications migrated to
PostgreSQL, they were / are the subject of performance tests to ensure
that there was no degradation.

Q: Scalability?
A: Not tested

Q: Tuning?
A: (no answer)

Q: Tools?
A: psql is well done (command history, online help, ...).
We use phpPgAdmin a bit.

Q: What do you think of the support proposed by PostgreSQL community?
Does it seem effective?
A: Yes, very responsive and effective.

--
Jean-Paul Argudo
www.PostgreSQLFr.org
www.dalibo.com